Mobile video startup Vuclip on Tuesday opened for business to serve up online video to mobile users and offer technology that helps online publishers quickly make video content available for mobile audiences.

Mobile video has been dogged by problems. Blame falls on incompatible networks, incompatible handsets, and market immaturity, among other issues. As a result, the market's  potential has eluded content providers, marketers, and investors.

Vuclip says it can help content providers and marketers by significantly reducing delays in transforming online video into mobile video.  After all, such videos need to run on roughly 2000 different handset models.

The Milpitas, California, startup is a re-start of Blueapple.mobi, a four-year-old mobile video chat company that developed a video search service.  That service had allowed mobile users to view online video by quickly formating videos for users' particular handset and carrier.

The relaunched company will continue to offer video search for mobile phones but will also offer online publishers its coding technology to automatically convert online video content for mobile consumption on most phones.

“The demand for mobile video outstrips supply because you have to come up with 20 or 30 different versions of every video so the video can play on the most popular types of devices,” said Nickhil Jakatdar, CEO of Vuclip. “So if you use a phone that is not supported you are out of luck.”

Instead of pre-encoding each video for as many different phones as possible, Vuclip encodes videos on the fly. Users search for Internet videos using Vuclip's technology, and if they decide to watch a video it is then encoded for viewing on the user's particular phone.

“We've already spent four years wrestling with this problem, so we are now in the unique position that we can solve this need better than anybody else,” Mr. Jakatdar said.

Vuclip wraps social-networking features such as video, playlists, and alerts around its video search technology.

The company, which also has offices in Beijing and Delhi, has so far taken $8.1 million in funding from NEA and Index Ventures.