J-Stream Inc., a content-delivery service company, will begin a new service involving digital audio data distribution by packet transfer this summer.

J-Stream's "Pho-dio" is its current audio data-delivery agent service mainly for music distribution providers. Using this service, original providers compress and encode streaming music data with applications such as RealAudio and Windows Media. Then, J-Stream decodes them with the computer telephony integration (CTI) server and distributes them to cellular phone users via traditional voice channels.

J-Stream's new service will distribute audio data via the packet transmission network for cellular phones. This will feature better audio quality for cellular phone users. J-Stream has not decided yet whether this new service will be provided as one menu of "Pho-dio."

In order to enjoy the new service, users may need to have new types of cellular phone handsets that support video content. At present, NTT DoCoMo Inc.'s "i-Motion" and KDDI Group's "ezmovie" have similar video content distribution services for cellular phone users. Both NTT DoCoMo and KDDI use MPEG-4 as the encoding format.

J-Stream may use the MPEG-4 format to distribute music data as well.