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As we reported, some of the biggest names in the business, Coca-Cola and AdMob, have partnered with mywaves to offer click-to-video advertising for the first time.

When we asked him why nobody ever did this before, mywaves CEO Rajeev Raman pointed out, “Video on the mobile phone is a very tough problem”. Even signing up for weather information often required users to provide their cell phone model and provider name - and hope that weather information was available for them. Instead, the strategy of mywaves was to “put all the smarts on the service side” matching the system to the customers instead of matching the customers to the system.

Using the mywaves service can be deceptively simple, but the power under the hood is the company’s handset database, which contains detailed information about each different type of phone: screen size, memory size, etc. As Raman describes it, when a mobile user clicks their Play button, “it queries the database and tells you, ‘here are the kinds of things that actually work for your handset’”. The result: video begins playing in a carrier-independent, handset-independent approach to mobile video that anybody can watch.

The company’s attitude about content is also innovative. Previously, most mobile video was scheduled, live versions of what could be seen on television. But Raman likes to describe mywaves with the slogan, “everything you can’t watch on TV, we give you free on your phone”. Yes, they offer content from the major news networks, Comedy Central, CNN, MTV, VH1,and Discovery (including content that mobile providers charge US$10 - US$15 a month for). But they also feature web videos, RSS video podcast feeds, personal videos, and popular viral clips. Users can upload video, create channels and share them by text messaging or email.

Some Brightcove or YouTube content is available on mobile networks, but only a small portion, and mobile subscribers have to pay for it. “That’s a little bit of a head scratcher” says Raman. Like YouTube’s player, the mywaves player can be embedded on web pages and MySpace profiles. But unlike YouTube, mywaves has a unique “SND2MBL” button that allows any visitor (or their friends) to watch that content on their phone for free. That button is becoming popular among website owners.

Since the mywaves service was released publicly in late December, more than 400,000 people have used the service to watch videos on their cell phones, choosing from tens of thousands of content channels. So far, the cost of bandwidth on mobile devices, though it discourages data transfer, has not prevented mywaves from growing quickly.

Behind the scenes, mywaves has sharp people: the executive team includes veterans of Yahoo, Napster, Danger, PayPal, and TiVo. But, says Raman, “It’s always humbling to remember that the ability of one company to hit the nail on the head is very limited”.