The year is only a little more than half over, but 2006 has already been very good to Raja Khanna. The company he co-founded, QuickPlay Media Inc., has been named company of the year in the digital media industry, and he's got every major wireless carrier in Canada using his video-to-mobile phone service – not to mention a whole slew of other customers. Not bad for a firm that's less than two years old.

Rising rapidly to the top ranks of Canadian new media, Toronto-based QuickPlay won the Canadian New Media Award for Company of the Year in May; a year earlier, the firm won a CNMA for Most Promising New Company. Since its founding in November 2004, QuickPlay has made a name for itself as one of Canada's leading providers of video content to wireless devices, with more than two million video downloads logged to date.

"We're about disposable content," explains Khanna, whose formal title is chief creative officer and co-founder of QuickPlay. "We're about five minutes [when] you want to be entertained or you want to see some information on your phone."

Khanna and partner Wayne Purboo founded the company in part in response to network upgrades from Canada's major wireless carriers, who began moving to higher-speed 2.5G standards such as CDMA1X (in the case of Bell Mobility and Telus Mobility) and EDGE (in the case of Rogers Wireless). Those higher speeds, of course, mean more data per second, which in turn meant delivering full-motion video to mobile phones was about to become a reality.

Two years later, video to the cellphone is still struggling to make its mark – audio downloads were a US$400-million business globally last year, compared with just US$62 million for the mobile video market – but the faithful such as Khanna remain upbeat. "Video, I think, is destined to be the big thing – it's what people like to consume," Khanna says. "What's been the challenge so far is that the user experience has been poor."

One factor that may help propel growth is that those same carriers who sparked QuickPlay's genesis with their improved networks have recently undergone another upgrade. The rollout of new high-speed wireless voice and data networks such as EvDO – used by Bell Mobility, Telus Mobility and the rest of the incumbent telephone company carriers – and HSDPA, which is only employed in Canada by Rogers Communications at present, has allowed mobile video providers to move from a download-only model to streaming video.

The download-driven way of doing things contributed to that poor user experience around mobile video, Khanna says. With downloads, "you've got to wait longer, you have to have enough room on your device to store it, and so on," he says. "With streaming, you just kind of hit play and it starts streaming and that's it."

Not having to wait for a download to finish before accessing content has also shifted the business model: instead of a pay-per-download fee structure, many of QuickPlay's carrier clients are now moving to an "all-you-can-eat" monthly subscription, with more or less unlimited downloading. "That's a lot more user-friendly: you don't have to think about $2 or $3 every time you're watching something – you kind of just pay one fee per month," Khanna says.

That shift is also encouraging mobile subscribers to broaden their tastes and be more adventurous in the content they access. "I think they're going to want to watch very disposable content, like the news and the latest music video or whatever – stuff they don't need to own and have resident on their handset," Khanna notes. With the move to monthly subscriptions and more streaming content, the genres or formats of the most-accessed clips have shifted too.

"In the pay-per-clip model, news and weather did horribly – nobody bought them, because who wants to pay $2 to get the weather, or watch one news clip or one headline?," Khanna notes. "But in an all-you-can-eat model, and especially where the user experience is nice and quick, everybody wants to do that. It's obvious – you've got two minutes or three minutes to spare, you just check the weather, or check the news." Now, he says, news and weather clips lead the pack in most-downloaded status.

QuickPlay's expontentional growth is evidenced by the fact that its content delivery solutions have recently gained favour with other Canadian carriers beyond Bell, Telus and Rogers. In June, the wireless arm of Manitoba Telecom Systems, the dominant phone company in that province, signed a contract with QuickPlay. Earlier in July, SaskTel – the incumbent carrier in Saskatchewan – followed suite. Finally, a deal with East Coast phone company Aliant will soon be announced, Khanna says.

And the firm plans on furthering its business in the U.S. Many of the larger convergent media companies, such as ESPN, Viacom, E! Entertainment and MTV Networks, are already clients of QuickPlay's, but Khanna says those relationships will be deepening before year's-end. "We'll have some pretty exciting announcement with MTV shortly," he hints.

Aside from the mobile phone market, QuickPlay has turned to a more staid – but home-grown – device: Research in Motion's BlackBerry. Although the handhelds have been traditionally positioned as a tool for corporate workforces, QuickPlay VP of marketing Mark Hyland says "you're starting to see them on college campuses and so on and so forth." Accordingly, QuickPlay is now marketing a new service, dubbed QuickPlayer for Blackberry, that offers individual consumers the choice of streamed audio channels for listening on their RIM device. With it, the company hopes to capture both those using their Blackberries as more of a social networking device to stay connected with friends and family, and the hardcore base of corporate users.

"Even the business consumers like to consume media," Khanna notes. "Certainly professionals that like their sports and entertainment too. I think it's a very attractive target demographic…they're high spenders on mobile, and they haven't yet had access to good media services on Blackberries."

With the current trend of "you-media" tools such as blogging and podcasting being adopted by the corporate world for getting marketing messages out, Khanna says content services for Blackberries will likely gain more ground. "It wasn't something that we initially thought of at the beginning, but it's quickly become an important part of our Blackberry strategy," he says.

With clearly so much invested in the emerging mobile video market, one might think that Khanna has been infected with the same kind of relentless – and fatal – optimism that led others to march into technologies such as interactive television and others whose promise remains as yet unfulfilled. But he says he's also pragmatic, and realizes that despite the buzzword-laden hype over "disposable" and "on demand" content, it's not a game where all comers will walk away happy: some things just won't translate well to the mobile video space, despite the efforts underway.

He points to the "mobisode" concept – a series of short interconnected episodes – as an idea that may not stand the test of time on mobile devices. "Immediacy, I think, is key," he says. In the case of a serial drama for mobile phones, "how often are people going to feel compelled to see that thing right now?," he asks. "You have to create that demand. I don't think this is the platform on which to create that demand….I don't think there's a sense of urgency for people to pick up their phone and check it out. And, without the urgency, I don't think the content will really do well."