Any monkey can mobilize video

By Dave Sloan

December 15, 2008

In the last year we have seen a trend in advanced mobile devices: larger screens and faster connections. Most newer devices offer either 3G connection or WiFi or both, and larger, media-friendly screens.

After the iPhone, we have seen devices such as the T-Mobile Google Android-backed G1, the Sprint Instinct and the BlackBerry Bold and BlackBerry Storm. More consumers are open to the idea of buying a mobile device that doubles as an entertainment device.

It’s no surprise that Nielsen Mobile announced a whopping 14 percent growth in mobile video usage from the second quarter to the third.

Popular media events such as the Beijing Olympics and the presidential election are attracting more mobile video users. Many of these viewers are discovering free WAP sites that support video – for example, http://mobile.nbcolympics.com – that make viewing more accessible to a broader audience.

Although these services are not yet widely adopted, engagement of mobile video already outpaces desktop video with 3.6 hours per month, on average, compared to 2.5 hours per month for desktop video.

Wireless carriers are slowly getting on the bandwagon.

Apple iPhone EDGE data plans start at $20 per month from AT&T, T-Mobile charges $25 per month and BlackBerry Storm data plans from Verizon start at $35.

With faster networks and large screens, users are adopting mobile television services, both free such as YouTube and subscription-based.

Still, on average, only 4 percent of mobile users subscribe to mobile video services.

For content owners and carriers, now is the time to mobilize your video. However, there is a lot more to mobilizing video than first meets the eye.

Just like mobilizing a Web site, success will not simply be found in making all your content smaller. There’s a lot more to great mobile design than just dumbing down a desktop experience.

The mobile environment is extremely fragmented, with hundreds of models of phones in users’ hands nationwide.

Also, carrier network speeds vary from slow GPRS and CDMA connections to 2.5 generation networks such as EDGE to faster 3G networks including EVDO and WiFi.

Many mobile video delivery vendors offer to mobilize desktop videos for content owners, but they may be missing the mark.

Sometimes, providing mobile video literally just means formatting video for iPhone and assuming the user is always on a high-speed WiFi connection such as 200 kbps.

More often, mobilizing video means manually ingesting various copies of an original video file for different devices and network bit-rates.

This process is labor intensive, slow and expensive. And the majority of these videos may never even be watched, so the ROI of all that work is not clear.

As it turns out, it is really difficult to efficiently mobilize videos for real-world conditions.

Sure, any startup can get free open source streaming tools and call itself a mobile video delivery shop. Any monkey can mobilize video.

But the risk is that not many devices will be supported, video streaming quality will include awkward buffering and image breakup, and only the fasted network connections will be supported.

As a result, the majority of users will have a poor user experience with mobile video. Just creating a video app is not enough.

For example, some video player applications with well-laid out navigation fail to stream smooth video even on high speed WiFi connections.

The trick is to have a powerful transcoding and streaming platform to handle the heavy lifting, not to just put a pretty user interface on an application.

Creating a great mobile video experience includes an intuitive search and discovery interface, supporting the majority of devices and creating a smooth video playback under any network conditions.

Without these key elements in place, users will be turned off by low-quality video and will not come back.

To build a robust mobile video application or Web site, mobile video formatting and delivery tools need to be able transcode video on-the-fly.

This means that once a phone requests a video from a mobile browser, the video begins transcoding and streaming all at once, so there is no long wait. Users want their video to begin playing as soon as possible.

A good transcoding engine will accommodate for the hundreds of device formats out there, not just the top 10 or so.

Not everyone has an iPhone, and not everyone is on a 3G network. The best video formatting and delivery tools accommodate for hundreds of device profiles and can handle low bandwidth conditions such as 2G, poor network coverage and network handoffs.

The real world of mobile users is very fragmented with hundreds of types of devices and spotty network coverage. A good video solution must include adaptive streaming that can detect the available network bandwidth and stream the most efficient video stream based on those changing conditions.

Of course, the economics of mobilizing video have to make sense.

Without ROI, there is no point in deploying video to the mobile community. The best mobile video delivery tools are easy to integrate into existing architectures and don’t cost millions of dollars to implement.

Mobile users have shown an increasing interest in video on their phone. However, there are a lot of issues to get past, including price, discovery and available content.

But download time, image quality, device support and ease of integration are no longer standing between you and your mobile users.

Sure, any monkey can mobilize video. But a great mobile video experience requires some attention to the complexity of the environment.

User experience is everything, and just adding mobile video as a feature will not lead to success.

Having mobile video may have initially been a novelty, but now that the novelty is gone, the next step in the mobile evolution is to provide a quality, smooth, impressive video playback experience that meets user expectations.

Dave Sloan is director of marketing at Avot Media Inc., Sunnyvale, CA. Reach him at dave@avotmedia.com.