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Filed under: Distribution •Web Video •

Mobile Video: Distribution to the Fourth Screen

Linear vs. VOD

Most of us are now familiar with portals featuring streams of broadcast feeds under either a carrier controlled portal (VCast, Sprint TV) or a third party (MobiTV, SmartVideo). Most recently there has been a lot of buzz about Qualcomm’s Media Flo - now shortened to Flo - technology that will allow reception of television digital signals on handsets. While all of these methods may be cool for a “hey look at this!” moment, aside from sporting events or possibly for Presidential inaugurations, we don’t see a long-term market for this.

Mobile viewers are still tied to viewing a set broadcast schedule. The whole premise behind mobile is anytime/anywhere convenience means that if you have 5 minutes until your next meeting, you don’t want to wait until 18 minutes past the hour to get a weather update; you want it at that very moment. Long form content is more appealing when you have a large segment of the population that commutes on mass transit with nothing but time (Asia, Europe) or you live with your family in a small apartment with only one TV your dad controls (Japan, South Korea). As we’ve all seen with the Internet, VOD is going to be the dominating mode for any video viewing on mobile devices.

That said, VOD will take two forms: live stream and download and play. The benefit to download and play is that the resolution and quality can be higher, however you run into the frustration factor of not providing immediate satisfaction to your viewer. Going forward, you’ll see this appear more for advertising/promotional spots and the viral nature of mobile can be used to increase reach.

A majority of mobile video will come as a live stream. While the quality will have to be stepped down a bit, within the next few years, you can expect to see 4G services starting to pop up which will make live streaming a true quality experience (see chart below). In the meantime, immediacy of viewing is going to make the demand for mobile video grow. A prime example of this would local news channels sending out SMS alerts about a breaking news story with a link to the video stream.

Data transmission speeds for mobile.

In any either case, for you the video producer this will have little personal impact. The system used for distribution for mobile video will transcode content into the various formats needed. For example, if you were to create a 30sec news opening for a local station, you wouldn’t worry about the size and power of the transmission tower - you simply would deliver the spot in a format that the station would specify. That is based on the equipment they would use to ingest the media, be it videotape, or a digital file format like QuickTime or WMV.

We’ll cover those enterprise or workgroup software solutions in a future article. If you can’t wait, start with a Telestream product called FlipFactory, or dig deep on the Avid Website and read about Active Content Manager. The important thing to realize is that process of changing digital video (something we understand) into another format (one that mobile devices can understand) is not our job. It’s a consideration in terms of design and production, but not in terms of final output.

Summary

For Video Professionals and Content producers, developing video for mobile applications is similar to the old dark days of getting QuickTime movies to play on 4x CD-ROMs. Quality, size and frame rate took a back seat to the need of getting it to play at all. There was almost no resources or documentation available to help you - figuring out why a digital file would play on this model of CD –ROM and computer but not on that one was on you.

However, we all took a deep breath and dove into the marketplace, simply because we recognized that it was the “next big thing.” Let’s face it - we are standing at the precipice once again. The iPhone alone demonstrates what is possible in the future of mobile technologies - constant connectivity and useful applications at your fingertips. Internet access via mobile has already outpaced access via computers in some parts of the world and this trend will only continue as devices get more powerful and bandwidth gets cheaper.

Mobile devices have definitely taken a step towards true personal computing, providing the access to information that users have been dreaming about. For those of us in video production, it’s time to step up and embrace the fourth screen! 

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