I AM A SUCKER.
Invariably during the various trade shows I or others from Cartt.ca attend, be it the NCTA, NAB, IPTV, SCTE, Banff, or this week’s CTAM, there’s a session that promises we’re going to be presented with some kind of progress on the mobile video front.
And every time I fall for it. I attend the session hoping to hear some kind of concrete direction we may be heading when it comes to taking my video with me on a Blackberry or an iPhone or an Instinct or somesuch. And every time I come away disappointed. Forgive me my skepticism but there has been so much hype – for years now, really – and mobile video has gone almost nowhere in North America. At least not from a carrier or broadcaster point of view.
Oh, I hear it’s all the rage in the far east and a number of other places and I say “That’s great. Good for them.” But here in North America? Not much. The big three Canadian carriers, for example – all of whom offer MobiTV, about 20 channels of linear television – won`t comment on the record how popular it is. But off the record? Hardly anyone uses it.
Despite all the talk that consumers want whatever they want whenever they want it wherever they want it, which is mostly true, consuming video on a mobile phone is still a lousy experience. Jitter, delays, terrible displays, poor sound – added to the cost for such data transfers – makes the mass rollout of mobile video a pipe dream.
Still.
Despite years of promise of this third screen.
There was a session Monday morning at the CTAM Summit in Boston which I attended – against my better judgement – on mobile video (What’s the old adage of a sign of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result?). It was called “Mobile Video: Tiny Screen, Big Impact.”
After sitting through the entire hour, it could have been described as “Tiny, Unwatchable Screen, Little Impact”. And that was the impression I got after listening to four guys whose jobs hinge on taking mobile video to the masses!
Take MediaFlo for example. The Qualcomm owned company provides a broadcast overlay of over 20 channels or so (but which needs special software and hardware in the handsets). It’s not available in four major markets (like Boston and San Francisco) until conventional broadcasters hand over their 70 MHz spectrum on February 19, 2009.
Number of MediaFlo-capable handsets. Seven. Uptake? It’s barely countable.
And MediaFlo is hoping that people will want to watch video on their cell phones in a similar way they watch on TV – on linear channels – when most research says that mobile users just sample video here and there as they can – and most of the viewing is just clips, which users also enjoy sending to their friends. To be fair, MediaFlo is working on more than just linear TV to the mobile phone.
I’ll cede the point to the panellists that mobile viewers will be interested in linear viewing when it comes to breaking news and sports, but will they watch other long-form content? I don’t believe that. And that has a lot to do with the fact that while mobile video always looks good in tests, it’s still very problematic in the real world. I’ve tested enough video-capable handsets to know that when there are very few using it, it works just fine. But once there is any kind of significant loading on a wireless network for popular video – it craps out.
Perhaps the saviour of mobile video will be the iPhone. It’s a slick, gorgeous device perfectly suited for video. But it doesn’t come with a Flash plug-in, just Apple’s own QuickTime. Trouble is, just about all Internet video is Adobe Flash – so don’t look for that unit to be a saviour just yet.
And while it’s true there are a number of ways consumers can customize their handsets and find video to consume (not to mention create and share), it takes a little work by the user – and data costs are still very high, limiting uptake, and even experimentation. There are numerous iPhone apps, of course, but all require a search and install by users and history shows that people love the one-stop shop (I’m looking at you, iTunes).
“Look at what consumers are being asked to do,” said Frank Barbieri, CEO of Transpera, a company that stitches advertising to mobile video. “They’re being asked to pay 10 to 15 dollars extra per month for something they already get at home… for lower quality and no DVR functionality.”
Perhaps the definitive explanation on the state of mobile video came from MediaFlo’s SVP programming Jonathan Barzilay who said simply: “Everything is being experimented with.”
That’s right, it’s still in the experimentation mode. And this is years after carriers and producers in places like Korea have made a business out of it.
So that’s it for mobile video for me for a while. I’ll keep an eye on it but I’m doing to stick to reporting on VOD, on broadband video. On the impact of social media on broadcast, cable and telecom, and so on. I’m leaving any musing about mobile video – which is a stalled application – aside for a little while.
Until something real happens.
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