January 25, 2006

Mobile TV: The Telephone's Next Frontier, and Mobisodes will Be the Trailblazers

Signal to Noise: Useful Information and Analysis

By Jim Barthold

After years of preaching about how voice-over-IP-or in cable lingo, packetized voice-will transform wireline telecommunications from a voice-centric experience into something infinitely more wonderful and 21st Century, it's ironic that the first truly multimedia offerings are coming to wireless devices while cable and other operators are rolling out VoIP as-you guessed it-telephone service.

Mobile TV is intrinsic to third generation (3G) mobile devices and is a foundational building block in cable's relationship with Sprint. Since mobile is the hotbed of telephony innovation, this newsletter will take the next two issues to look at the many issues facing mobile multimedia and specifically mobile TV.

Casting aside the technology issues-if you can't maintain a low bandwidth voice conversation, how are you going to keep a basketball game up, running and visible for an extended period of time on a wireless device?-mobile TV is stepping up as the nirvana of an entire wireless industry. With that much at stake, it's reasonable to assume that some version of 3G mobile or some off-the-board version like IPWireless' Universal Mobile Telecommunications System Time Division-Code Division Multiple Access (UMTS TD-CDMA) will be able to reliably deliver the necessary bits and keep them running.

TDtv launch

IPWireless last week launched a mobile TV solution it calls TDtv to encourage mobile operators to use technology that, tellingly, it is making available Stateside in the 2.5 GHz band that is held by cable's good friends at Sprint Nextel. But that's another issue. For now, apparently there is enough worldwide interest in mobile TV to make the technology work. The big question is: Who wants to watch Oprah on a 2-inch screen?

"I wouldn't suggest mobile TV … will not have a niche role. We see it as one of a lot of different things that would be available to building up significant ARPU for the operator in the data services arena and not the silver bullet single application that a subscriber's going to pay $10-$15 a month to watch video on a very small screen," said John Orlando, vice president of marketing for NMS Communications, a leading provider of ringback services-and who'd have thought that would become such a hot business?

Orlando thinks mobile TV should be an ingredient in a multimedia offering, not main course.

Slingbox endorsement

"My take is if I wanted to watch TV anywhere in the world, I'd just get a Slingbox," he said.

That doesn't mean those cute little cell screens are only good for taking and displaying pictures of the family pets. Sprint, Verizon, Cingular and others are already showing there's a market for moving pictures on cell phones; it's just that nobody wants to watch something that resembles a bore-you-to-tears PowerPoint marketing product presentation.

Keep it simple and keep it to 90 seconds, Orlando advised.

Like a trade journalist, "the mobile user has about a 90-second interest span, and beyond that on a small phone, you're going to lose them," Orlando said, omitting, of course, the part about the trade journalist. "They're not trying to watch a soccer game where the ball is a pin prick."

Mobisodes enter the fray

They are, however, amenable to "mobisodes": short, self-standing video clips tailored for cell phones and "something somebody would watch for 90 seconds and think was valuable," he said.

Instead of showing a 60-minute episode of Time Tunnel, a cable/mobile operator could, perhaps, show a 90-second mobisode of Doug and Tony crash-landing on Devil's Island.

"Perhaps (the person with the phone would) think it was so cool they'd want to share it, which is another benefit for the mobile operator because they'd get the bandwidth messaging transaction of sending it to your friend," Orlando said.

Cable, he said, "is very well-tuned to deliver a broad array of content. It's an absolute truth that if we're talking about something like mobile TV service that it looks and feels like something that cable does today. What isn't a match … is that appropriate level of content to dish immediately to the handset."

Tailoring the content

A whole new industry may actually emerge to tailor content for cell phones. NMS would like to play as "the engine to help wireless operators get the right content to a subscriber," Orlando said. "If they want to be a cable feed or a content feed … our goal is helping improve their customer relationship and market the appropriate content to them."

That content, he emphasized, will probably come from cable and/or one of its partners because "the cable guys and those with the relationships with them should be able to figure this out quicker," he said.

Orlando said it's likely that mobisodes will end up being mobile TV on today's peer-to-peer networks. Next week, a Roundbox executive will take his shot explaining why mobisodes are only a piece of a mobile TV revolution.

-Jim Barthold