San Jose, CA—Moderated by Keynote Systems’ senior director Manny Gonzalez, the panel included Babak Jafarian, co-founder/chief strategy officer of Ortiva Wireless, Daren Gill, vp/gm of Veveo and Andrew McFarlane, co-founder/CEO of Buzzwire.
Jafarian, whose company optimizes content for the mobile platform, talked about some of the challenges in an environment in which the price of streaming video doesn’t justify the revenues generated–but also stressed the iPhone as a game-changer for video on the phone. “We’re burning more of the resources are being burned for video, which isn’t our cash cow,” he says. “We’ve seen the phenomenon of iPhone which brings the nice idea of the off-deck attitude. Let other people create content and consider the wireless operator as the pipe.”
Video quality is another issue, since content distributors often optimize the video for the lowest-common denominator handset. “With a device as small and unreliable as a phone, you have problems,” he said. “Video is the first time mobile carriers are moving from a real-time service into a packet data network, which is challenging.”
He suggested that rather seeing the mobile platform as the third screen, that we might think of it as its own unique environment. “We should define the type of quality in a proper manner and allocate the most important thing with the least resources,” he said. “This isn’t as straight forward as creating video for TV and the web and then streaming it through the mobile handset.”
Gill, whose company is all about content discovery, pointed out how web video is the most discoverable video; TV and mobile are both difficult platforms for finding video. The fact that most mobile phones don’t play video also cuts down on the viral nature. “Transcoding for delivery is a “necessary evil” of the day,” he admitted. “It’s not something that we like to do so more and more we’re finding the content available in mobile-ready form. This is definitely one of the challenges.
One of the realities of web video is that it is all about choice, said Gill who reported that there are 220 million videos on the web, from 150,000 sources, whereas both TV and mobile are limited to 10,000 to 50,000 titles from 200 sources. “Consumers aren’t about walled gardens,” he said. “You have to deliver them choice. The things that people want to watch don’t exist in one silo.Does popularity equal relevance? Yes, to start off with. But you need to put a structure on top of that.” He described Veveo’s structure for finding media, which was based not simply on the UGC world but a variety of other sources. “So you can leverage an existing taxonomy, leverage the social graph on UGC sites and make it easier to find what you want on new platforms,” he said about the application, vtap, which is available on the mobile browser at m.vtap.com or with vtap clients for Windows Mobile, iPhone, Symbian and J2ME.
Buzzwire’s McFarlane talked about the fact that ultimately the users will decide what the most interesting content is, as carriers break down the wall. Users will decide what’s most interesting. “Content players will have to respond to that. We offer the ability to customize the experience.”
Killing time or saving times are the two “needs” that people turn to the mobile phone to fulfill, agreed Gill, who noted that the use of smart phones–particularly iPhone and Blackberry, will shake things up. But what will really tip the video market on the mobile phone is unlimited data plans. “If you get a situation where someone has the phone and an unlimited data plan, it’ll work,” he said. “Getting to that point is the trick. The content will follow.”
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