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On the coming mobileVideo revolution

Mobile Monday was a huge success last night - with more people in the room than we can handle. Check out the audio recording of the evening, recorded and prepared by Niall Kennedy’s site for a link to the audio of the evening’s discussions. (updated: 11-Feb with link to audio)

Two of the presenters - Ted Shelton who just joined Orb as EVP/Operations and Alan Moskowitz, the Product Marketing honcho for Idetic (MobiTV) . Both these products stream video to your phone, so it was very good to have them present together.

After taking it all in, I was particularly struck that Orb’s model - streaming content that one legitimately owns - is slightly hampering to the network as your content is effectively beamed to you. That feels sort of kludgey as a permanent solution, especially when I’m especially tracking the emergence of device independent data access that’s predicated on your data being resident up in the clouds. MobiTV aligns itself with the content owners and streams content down to you as its service offering, so it fits my model of “do you really want to take your data with you?”.

I can see Orb’s point: one beaming, one viewing, with very limited (if any) caching is what’ll be demanded by the content mafia types (aka RIAA and MPAA and whoever else I fund the EFF to fight). So they have bandwidth hits for the upload and the download, as well as the mesh processing network that uses peer-to-peer to process the images. Will capacity become a huge issue if everyone is beaming personal content over the net? Probably. We’ve got all that dark fiber, that extra capacity left over from the buildout. That’s slowly being used as broadband adoption is coming along, but - and this has been what caught my eye in all the fuss over telecom mergers - the name of the game there is pure convergence, but it will also come with some bloody consolidation.

Before convergence became associated with the tech nirvana of delivering multiple services (i.e., “more”) it was usually associated with the traditional model of mergers and consolidation (i.e., all too often “less”). The things I read on The Wall Street Journal tend to focus more on this consolidation aspect - and I just wonder if the timing of these new consumer technologies is off. The networks have sat and prices have fallen. The companies have fallen too on hard times and the backhaul is just not as profitable as the good old days of rich long distance tariffs.

Down in the trenches, we see the carriers (who I have little sympathy for) getting squeezed as for one, the ambitions of folks like Comcast to deliver a premium cable broadband solution aren’t proving viable - even as broadband adoption is gaining (have to look for the link).

So what if, after many years, customers have gone in for broadband? Do those carriers really want applications that drive heavy usage of that resource? Ted looked like he was thirsting for the fight, and commented a couple times about shattering business models. I can’t help but think that the model of data in the sky would be so much more simpler. But the content mafia goes nuts over that. So Orb’s got a hell of an idea, but is set to dance a fine line. MobiTV is going with the proven model of walled garden, and it’ll work - bored people are happy to watch just about anything (think JetBlue) - as long as you can get news, sports and things like Discovery, many people will be very happy with this less personalized mode.

Some discussion followed afterwards (at the bar naturally). During a conversation on videoblogging, I thought of user generated content - the sort of stuff that the guys at Our Media are working on. If content is licensed under some friendly model (Creative Commons) it could go a long way to providing content for mobile users. These grassroots types typically look for exposure more than anything else. We could expect them not to be as eager at the content mafia to get in the way and demand a payment right then or impose other limitations. What might be even cooler is that this grassroots content will tend toward the shorter, more bite-sized experience, which was there really interesting request that the guy from MobiTV made. They’ve datamined their network to come up with all sorts of interesting slices on the user experience as their customers are roaming the world. They’ve found that content of under 6 minutes - with a discrete start and finish - seems to be most appealing to their audience. They’re doing professional, broadcast-style programming, so for them it takes the form of music video type stuff or comedy sketches.

Now this is an area where grassroots can compete and provide extreme value. Think of all those homebrew MoveOn commercials or Bush in 30 seconds. Think of that EPIC video. If someone can distill their homebrew message into something short enough to divert me while I’m waiting in the doctor’s office then I’ll be happy to consume. The viral memes that send these around the web thru IM or email or blogs can also send these to us precisely when we have time and want to be amused. How cool would it be to have a channel - like a RSS feed of microcontent like this? I would consume video like I consume MegaTokyo - because it is easy to just pull it up and look at it when I have a stray moment.