October 19, 2006

Mobile TV: An Idea That Won’t Go Away

By Jim Barthold

As the holiday buying season approaches with big box stores hawking TV sets that are just slightly larger than most football fields, the idea of putting video content onto microscopic mobile phone screens is more resilient than a werewolf being peppered by lead bullets.

In other words, and with apologies for the early Halloween analogy, it just won’t die.

The big attraction, of course, is that everyone recognizes there are 2.5 billion people worldwide – that’s 5 billion eyeballs outside of some of those nuclear waste sites where there tend to be more or less eyes on average – to watch this content. And when people are watching, advertisers are lining up like agents around a college football star, and content providers are salivating at the opportunity to get their stuff in front of them.

The trick is to make that stuff work.

First, there’s the network itself.

“The experience has been extremely variable and of poor quality. You get your mobile media, it looks great for a second, then it looks crummy, then it stops working and you have to reconnect five times to watch a five-minute clip,” said Grover Righter, vice president of business development at Ortiva Wireless.

Ortiva is attacking this part of the mobile TV conundrum by “constantly measuring the network that each mobile user is getting and adjusting the video stream appropriate to the network bandwidth and the error rate that particular handset is experiencing at the moment,” he said.

Righter described Ortiva as “a services network, a platform network that enables either content providers who work through carriers or content providers who work off deck or through carriers who want to deliver a set of video customers.”

The company’s primary customers are carriers and content providers followed by MVNOs.

After setting up the network to carry the content, the provider has to realize that this is not Milton Jerrold Shapp’s cable TV.

“The mobile use case is not identical with being home on your couch. In the mobile use case, you may be squeezing in a few minutes of entertainment between business meetings; you may be commuting; you may be doing a lot of different things, and you need time shifting and location shifting. It’s about snacking, entertainment snacking,” he said.

ROK Entertainment is going bananas over the idea of mobile snacking with its FreeBe TV offering that features, among other things, the Monkey News Network, 15-minute live news updates every 15 minutes read by lip-synching monkeys. And if that isn’t close to some cable TV programming, we’d be hard pressed to tell you what is.

Anyway, Monkey News Network, which Bruce Renny, group marketing director at ROK Entertainment described as “great fun,” is also something that won’t be showing up on any of those stuffy, albeit well-oiled mobile networks that Ortiva is pushing any time soon. That’s because ROK is pretty much thumbing its nose at the whole subscription mobile TV concept.

“The rationale behind FreeBe TV was to be able to offer an on-demand, mass market … multi-channel, worldwide-reach mobile TV service and do it for free,” Renny said. “Three’s no subscription charges. It doesn’t matter which carrier you’re with, providing you have a compatible handset and a GPRS bundle in your mobile tariff.”

That’s got to send a shudder into cable operators who are still trying to figure a way into what they hope is a lucrative market for their walled garden content. Renny, being the independent sort, is also a bit of an iconoclast, so it’s not surprising that he’s challenged the carriers – today’s and probably tomorrow’s – to just try to keep consumers from singing, “I want my FreeBe TV.”

“We want people to vote with their fingers,” he said.

He may be an iconoclast and somewhat of a rebel, but he’s not a thorough altruist. He understands that nothing in life is free, so he’s willing to acquire eyeballs first then draw advertisers to his audience.

“The ad industry is very agile and moves extremely fast,” he said. “They recognize that a 30-second made-for-TV advertisement will not work on the mobile phone.”

At the same time, consumers don’t want to waste 30 precious mobile seconds looking at an ad, either, so Renny is proposing something like a 3-second “sponsored by” burst before any of the FreeTV content packaged in a variety of You-Made-It TV genres that mimic YouTube.

He also might have something in the type of content that’s being delivered. The mobile screen is not the home HDTV, and mobile content is not a mini-series.

“On the mobile, you sit and watch for three minutes at a time; that’s it,” he said.

Which begs the question: Is it worth the time, effort and investment to guarantee that the networks are reliable and the content is deliverable and the eyeballs are in place?

“This is going to be a multi-billion-dollar industry,” Renny predicted. “After all, 2.5 billion of us have a phone, and we all love television; the convergence is inevitable.”

Maybe that’s why no one’s yet found the silver bullet that will kill this idea.

- Jim Barthold