Mobile Multimedia
Mobile video services may still be in their infancy, but mobile carriers — carried along themselves by the interest content producers in Hollywood and elsewhere are showing — have not been shy about experimenting with format, packaging, price and other service components. Here's some of what we've overheard in the last month related to this explosive trend:
“When you talk about video and how to format video to get the best quality, latency is just as critical or more critical than throughput. We spend as much time focusing on that as anything else.”
— Kris Rinne, chief technology officer of Cingular Wireless.
“Customers can take their mind off a busy day during a lunch break, breeze through a few minutes while waiting in the parking lot for a child's soccer practice to end or make a two-hour delay at the airport much more bearable.”
— Alana Muller, director of entertainment product marketing for Sprint, on the company's launch of pay-per-view, full-length movies.
“In most markets, no more than five percent of mobile subscribers are purchasing and downloading mobile content. Many users are turned off by the complexity of purchasing and downloading mobile content today. It's critical that advancements in mobile retailing simplify rather than hinder that process.”
— Chris Coffman, senior research analyst for Informa Telecoms & Media
“The greatest potential for this market rests with its ability to complement the existing video industry. For example, there will be more than 50 million portable media players in use worldwide by 2008. The portable/mobile long form video market will not likely cannibalize sales from the DVD and other traditional markets, but rather, supplement top-line growth.”
— Michael Inouye, analyst for In-Stat
