Motorola said Tuesday it agreed to acquire a startup company that provides servers and software for delivering video-on-demand to mobile devices and the home.

The communications giant will soup up its offerings to cable and other video service providers with the acquisition of Broadbus Technologies, which develops servers and software for a video delivery network. Broadbus, based in Boxborough, Massachusetts, counts Comcast, Charter Communications, and Time Warner Cable as customers.

“Today consumers expect to access video entertainment on the different devices they have, inside and outside of their home, in varying formats—and to have it available upon request,” said Dan Moloney, president of Motorola’s connected home solution group.

The Broadbus acquisition is one of a flurry of announcements from Motorola, which is holding an analyst day Tuesday (see Wipro, Motorola Form JV and Motorola Intros 2 Slim Phones). Schaumburg, Illinois-based Motorola also announced a joint venture with Huawei Technologies, a fellow telecom equipment supplier.

Motorola shares rose $0.25 to $21.37 per share in recent trading.

Broadbus’ products will allow Motorola, which is the No. 1 set-top box maker in the United States, to tackle the hot market of video-on-demand, which includes providing TV shows, movies, and other programming to viewers at home and on the go.

The startup’s servers and software allow service providers to deliver content whenever people want it, taking advantage of the time-shifting consumer devices that have been made popular by firms such as TiVo and Slingbox. By using dynamic random access memory (DRAM) instead of the hard-disk technology, the servers are more power-efficient and can store more high-definition videos.

Motorola is facing tough competition from Cisco, which bought set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta last year and has its own digital home ambition (see Cisco to Pack Retail Shelves).

Mobile Ambitions

Broadbus’ technologies also enable mobile services, which are seen as the next best way to make money for cellular operators and content holders such as movie studios (see Taking Hollywood Mobile). Mobile service providers in Europe began offering live broadcast of the World Cup in Germany last month (see Mobile to Score at World Cup).

Motorola, which is the No. 2 handset maker in the world, wants its cell phones to be the content carriers. The company has demonstrated a concept handset that can sync with a personal video recorder at home so that people can watch their favorite shows wherever they are.

Motorola declined to disclose its purchase price for Broadbus, which has raised $57 million in three rounds from venture capital firms such as Battery Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Comcast Interactive Capital since it was formed in 1999.

On Tuesday, Motorola also announced a joint venture with Huawei, the fast-growing Chinese telecom equipment supplier. The two companies will form an R&D center in Shanghai that develops products for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a third-generation cellular technology popular in Europe, and High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA), which enables an even faster data speed than UMTS.

Contact the writer:UWang@RedHerring.com