Great Review of the Current State of Mobile Video
The IEEE ComSoc had a great meeting yesterday. The meeting focused on the state of mobile video around the world.
I have to admit that I was a little concerned when I read the title of the talks. I was almost certain that I would be stuck listening to a product marketer discussed the finer points of MediaFLO or some other new video standard. Instead I was treated to a great review of the mobile video space by Colin Dixon of the Diffusion Group. He had some great numbers showing the customer adoption patterns of mobile broadcast video and other forms of mobile video.
If you have read many of my blog posts, then you probably know that I see the Internet with its on-demand content distribution model as the next wave for video delivery. So I have trouble figuring out a good business plan for broadcasting video channels to mobile phones. Multicast or broadcast TV made sense 60 years ago and has worked really well. But today, most people, especially young people, expect to get what they want when they want it. This is a unicast model, like the Internet. I just don’t understand why you would try to replicate the old TV model on the new mobile video-to-phone system. The craziest part of the model to me is that carriers not only are making their cell phone customers pay for this broadcast video service (such as VCast) but I am sure that the carriers will then turn right around to advertisers and sell ads over this subscription TV service. One of the more interesting points of the talk was his explanation of place shifting. This is when you use a system like Sling or Orb to store and transmit your TV signals from you home computer to your mobile device, regardless of where you are in the world. Orb has really taken off and has added 4 million customers in just a few months. By the end of this year, the number of place shifters will be in the range of 10 million users.
The second speaker was Christopher Dow, Director of Software Development and Architecture from Macrovision Corporation. His talk was a bit more technical as he went into the hardware, software and programming involved in providing video over a wide range of devices. One interesting point that he touched on was that content deliverers like Comcast are going to be expected to provide the same video over a wide range of devices through their triple play services, voice (like cell phones), TV, and Internet. The devices that consumers use on these different networks are vastly different in size and allowed video formats, but customers don’t understand this. Instead the show will need to be provided in a variety of formats.
Speaking of this mix of formats and screen sizes, Colin Dixon said that the only solution for content distributors will be to encode the content into different formats on the fly. He will be putting together a research paper on the state of the transcoding business later this year for those of you who follow that sector of the market. It should be interesting.
Tags: IEEE, mobile video, place shifting, transcoding