Mobile TV

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Calling All Videos

(c) WSJ

Alex Gurevich loves to log on to YouTube to watch music videos and comedy sketches on breaks from work. But the 24-year-old entrepreneur from San Francisco fretted that he couldn't take the fun with him on his cellphone. Mr. Gurevich assumed that signing up for a mobile video service would require a "superexpensive" phone and more than $20 extra a month in fees.

So he was surprised to find in January a free new mobile video service -- called MyWaves -- that works with his basic Motorola Razr. Now he is glued to it, regularly attempting to amuse his friends with stand-up comedy clips and other videos he has transferred to his phone. "Why would I sign up for another service if I can get this for free?" he says.

MyWaves Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., is one of a flurry of start-ups offering new ways to access Internet videos on cellphones, hoping to overcome barriers that have prevented mobile video from taking off in the past.

For years, cellular carriers including Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. have offered licensed video content for cellphones, such as sports highlights, TV shows and music videos. But these services, which carry monthly subscription fees, offer limited content programmed by the carrier and usually work only on certain phones. Adoption has been slow.

Now, the new services are taking a different approach, allowing users to view a wider array of Internet video clips -- without locking themselves into a subscription and without purchasing a fancier phone. The services each operate slightly differently, but users can view online videos using any standard video-enabled phone. Videos can be wirelessly downloaded to a handset for viewing later, or sometimes streamed over cellular networks to be watched in real time.

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The quality of the content is rarely as crisp as users are accustomed to online, and viewing can be limited by the amount of storage on a phone. But the services are generally free, powered by advertising and independent of particular carriers. Some new offerings say they have attracted nearly a million users and are attracting tens of thousands more a day.

Recently launched MyWaves offers hundreds of thousands of videos from a wide range of sources. Its online library, organized by "channels," includes clips acquired through arrangements with content providers, culled from available podcasts or provided by users themselves. People can access videos through a free application they download to their phones.

[Mobile Video]
A Motorola phone (top) and an iPhone (bottom) showing how online video can be accessed via MyWaves.

New York-based Cellfish Media LLC recently launched a new mobile entertainment site that allows users to transfer videos and other media, such as ringtones, to their phones from their computers. The service offers some 10,000 clips, including user-generated videos; content from partners, including, soon, NBC Universal; music videos; and original Cellfish series, like a soap opera involving sock puppets. Users upload videos to an online account, known as a locker. Then to retrieve the video, they can log into a mobile Web page. The video service is largely free, but some premium content like music videos carries a fee of up to $2.50.

3Guppies Inc. of Seattle doesn't provide content, but rather enables cellphone users to access online videos that they find themselves online. Users can send a video to their phones directly from the page where it resides, by downloading some software to their computers' Internet browser. Or they can upload videos to an online account, prompting the service to send a text message to a cellphone containing a link to the video.

3Guppies -- which doesn't offer streaming -- transmits videos that are available in a variety of popular digital formats. The service doesn't work with content that media companies protect with proprietary software, such as longer-form TV shows and movies.

The Small Screen

These new services are part of a broad sweep of mobile companies trying to get consumers to translate their fanaticism for online video watching to smaller screens. Popular video sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube have been branching into mobile by creating condensed mobile Web sites and preloading versions of their services on popular handsets like Apple Inc.'s iPhone. Carriers such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. have also been wooing customers with services that offer features like live TV.

But still the services haven't caught on. Of the nearly seven million users who watch mobile video or TV from their phones every month, the vast majority watch clips sent to them from family or friends, rather than video prepackaged by a carrier, according to research firm M:Metrics Inc. Overall just 3.6% of U.S. cellphone users subscribed to a mobile video service in the first quarter of 2007, up from 1.6% in the year-earlier period, according to market researcher Telephia Inc.

The new services are trying to open up the mobile video market by targeting a broader range of phones -- at a time when more than 70% of new handsets come with a built-in video player. Instead of charging monthly fees, all three plan to start offering mobile advertising, such as small text ads in the bottom of text-messages or sponsored content from brands.

Consumers are also voicing concerns about storage. Higher-end cellphones increasingly come with up to 64 megabytes of memory and slots that can accommodate more. But many new phones still come with just four or so megabytes, which may accommodate only a few several-minute-long clips.

[Mobile Video]














Limits of Streaming

Streaming video, which is viewed in real time rather than downloaded and stored for later, can be an option -- but only in areas where the network speeds are fast enough. "The experience just isn't really there and there is too much lag time," says Ben Bajarin, a digital media analyst for market-research firm Creative Strategies in Campbell, Calif. But he says that consumption of mobile video content will continue to rise, particularly as media companies create more content designed to entertain users for a few minutes at a time.

Many of the new companies envision themselves as technology -- not content -- companies and are starting to enable users to transfer other media to their phone like music and phones in the same way they can transfer video.

"We don't want to be perceived just as a catalog," says Cellfish Media's CEO Fabrice Sergent, who says the company's goal is to become a mobile version of iTunes. "The idea is really to create a seamless experience from the PC to the phone and from the phone to the PC."

Non-SMS Data Revenues US$11.3 Billion In First Quarter

(c) MocoNews

In the first quarter of this year global mobile data revenues from services other than SMS were US$11.3 billion according to Informa’s World Cellular Data Metrics (WCDM). This is a 39.5 percent year-on-year increase, with the first quarter of 2006 showing US$8.1 billion in non-SMS data revenues. Overall nearly a third of mobile data revenues now come from non-SMS services, but this varies significantly between carriers. KTF in Korea saw 70 percent of data revenues coming from non-SMS sources, while for Vodafone Egypt the figure was just 1 percent. Verizon Wireless clocked in at just over 50 percent and Sprint pulled about 55 percent. Here is a word doc with a few more telcos.

It’s a good sign for content, but also for SMS, since worldwide SMS traffic increased about 50 percent year-on-year to more than 620 billion messages for the quarter. SMS revenues increased 23 percent, and total global data revenues were US$34.3 billion for the quarter.

Mobile carriers fear 'big dumb pipe' debacle

(c) IT Business.ca

In their ongoing quest to find a market for 3G services, telcos look at Web 2.0 applications as a possible lure. Accenture, Vodafone, Telstra and others put their ears to the ground


The mobile Internet may finally be poised to take off, and could carry with it the third-generation wireless networks that so far have failed to live up to the early hype. The next question will be who benefits. Wireless carriers? Internet service providers? Third-party application providers?

A combination of evolving wireless technology and so-called Web 2.0 services such as social networking and user-generated content could be enough to get mobile Internet services moving, said Philippe Chauffard, executive director – network for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America at international consulting firm Accenture.

Representatives of carriers and others with an interest in mobile Internet development joined Chauffard in a panel discussion on the future of wireless at Accenture's annual Global Convergence Forum in Rome this week.

“We've talked about it for more than a decade, and there have been a number of not-so-successful attempts,” Chauffard said. “We've never had the true power of the Internet coming over the air until now.”

Chauffard argued that social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are better suited to mobile use than to sitting at a desk.

In an interview, he said mobile versions of such services might be the second-largest driver of mobile Internet services in the next few years, after enhanced instant messaging services. Also popular, he expects, will be mobile video and location-based services that help people find what they're looking for wherever they are.

If the carriers are to do well out of mobile Internet services, Chauffard said, they need to improve customer service, provide innovative offerings and price it all at an acceptable cost. He suggested that most consumers will be willing to pay a modest premium for mobility on top of what they now pay for fixed broadband services like DSL. To make such pricing economical, he added, carriers will need to run “very lean and mean” businesses.

Modern networks built entirely on Internet Protocol (IP) will help, he noted, which may give newcomers a slight advantage over incumbent carriers with existing investments in older technology.

The panelists also acknowledged a risk facing wireless carriers: They could invest money in building high-capacity networks, only to see other reap the benefits from offering services over their “big dumb pipes.”

To avoid that, suggested Tom Wheeler, managing director of private equity firm Core Capital Partners in Washington, D.C., carriers need to take advantage of the fact that they know more about their subscribers than anyone else does, and either sell that information to third-party content and service providers to help them target advertising at mobile customers, or possibly transmit advertising to handsets to be cached there and delivered at opportune times.

Later, journalists visiting Accenture's Innovation Center for Broadband outside Rome saw a mobile television service developed by the consulting firm and offered by two carriers, which has the ability to cache advertisements and insert them in content.

Panelist Mike Roudi, vice-president of wireless at Time-Warner Cable in the U.S., said usability is more important than the underlying technology. Time-Warner recently spent $2.5 billion (U.S.) acquiring wireless spectrum. Roudi said the company sees it as a way of extending its three existing product lines – video, Internet access and voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) – into the mobile arena. And he said Time-Warner wants to offer customers a seamless package of fixed and wireless services.

But Wheeler questioned whether bundling is the answer. “We've seen multiple instances in the past when the bundling was the big deal, and it hasn't delivered,” he said, though he acknowledged that past bundling has essentially been just a common bill for multiple services, whereas carriers are now talking about real integration in the network.

Stefane Parisse, head of strategy at mobile carrier Vodafone Italy, said it's not the bundle that counts, but the seamless integration of services.

“It's transitioning between services without the customer having to make conscious changes,” agreed Hugh Bradlow, chief technology officer at Australian carrier Telstra.

Carriers won't be able to do it singlehandedly, though. “We have learned that we cannot build new services by ourselves as we were used to in the past,” Parisse said. Instead, Chauffard suggested, partnerships and multi-company “ecosystems” will be the name of the game. But if the various players can get all these issues right, he said, “The stars are aligning for this thing to really take off this time.”