My skepticism of mobile TV is no secret. I’m pretty bullish on mobile video, though, when it’s part of making personal media time-, place- and platform-independent. It’s been disappointing to see carrier and device manufacturer’s efforts thus far focus on broadcast-style content that’s either live TV or “made for mobile” fluff. But noise coming out of the US cable industry’s yearly confab says that — in a real surprise — it might be cable operators that have the best ideas about mobile video.
Cable companies have been going for some time about offering the “quadruple play: video, voice, data and mobile. The mobile aspect thus far has just been as MVNOs in a few occasions rather than anything interesting, but (buzzword-laden) quotes from some execs seem to indicate that they have a good basis of understanding of how mobile video comes into the picture, such as how users “want this phone to do everything that their TV does and everything that their PC does.”
But it’s one from a Verizon honcho that does it: “”It’s really going to be on any device anywhere… we talk about time shifting. It’s going to be place shifting.”
That’s what’s going to make mobile video big: giving people mobile access to their personal media, in this case what they’ve got saved on their DVR, their movies or their favorite shows. It’s not going to be live TV — which will be used for news and sports events — and it isn’t going to be these stupid “mobisodes” that are just ads for real television shows. If I can watch TV on my mobile device on the way to work, I want to watch something I’m interested in, not whatever crappy breakfast talk shows I can get. Time- and place-shifting something my DVR grabbed last night, now that’s something I’d pay for.
Of course, part of the problem is that technology like DVB-H is better for sending video to mobiles than as streams over the network. But that’s not something end users will really care about. If there was a market demand for mobile live TV, people would buy those handheld sets that were the sign of cool people back in the mid-80s. Just because it’s going to be on a mobile phone doesn’t mean that people will automatically take to it any better. They’ll still complain that the screen’s too small and the reception’s no good. But make the hook something a lot more enticing — by making it better than live TV — and people will eat it up.