Although Internet television is growing at an incredibly fast
rate, it seems moving the medium on to mobile devices is not growing at
quite the
expected pace.
James Quintana Pearce of MocoNews,
recently referenced a Gartner survey
that indicated a lack of interest from Europeans in watching television
or video on their mobile phones in the next 12 months.
They cite “a
lack of consensus on business models, variety of different technologies
and shortage of airwaves” as reasons for the low response.
He also
noted a report from Juniper
that indicated consumer interest may not be burgeoning, predicting 120
million mobile TV watchers worldwide by 2012, which will probably be
less than 4 percent of the mobile phone user base.
I don’t really blame the survey respondents. Until
the video viewing
experience on mobile devices can compare to that of Internet video,
it’s hard to disagree with their negative sentiment.
Demand Is Growing
However, demand is
growing for a number of reasons cited in an IDC whitepaper,
Internet
and Mobile Video: Solutions for the Long Tail,
which include better devices, faster networks, rising consumer
awareness, price erosion and service bundling as well as the strong
adoption of mobile TV and video among youth.
Right now however, the same content that consumers are used to
accessing on their PCs isn’t rapidly being extended to mobile
video.
Why? Well, one reason is the complexity of delivering mobile
video
increases exponentially due to the variety of end-user devices: each
with their own unique screen size, resolution, bit-rate and supported
codecs.
This generates unique challenges for media companies which
are
struggling to keep up with the increased amount of transcoding required
to re-purpose video for the wide variety video-enable mobile devices on
the market.
The iPhone and YouTube
Take for example the iPhone. When Apple agreed to make YouTube
content available via its iPhone, users expected to start searching the
vast YouTube library of video immediately.
However, all of that content
has to be transcoded, or re-formatted to H.264, suitable for iPhone
viewing. So slowly but surely all of the YouTube content is being made
available to iPhone users.
When users have the same ubiquitous access
to video content from their mobile devices as they do from their PCs,
that’s when adoption will really begin to climb.
As we move toward improving networks and devices,
we’re
simultaneously moving toward improving transcoding technology which is
making viewing ubiquity possible and will vastly change the mobile
video viewing experience for the better.
Originally written by Brendon Mills of the RipCode Blog. RipCode offers on-demand video transcoding solutions to ease the process of re-purposing video into multiple viewing formats
