At first glance, it would appear that Verizon just is keeping with the global average. Cisco Systems’ Visual Networking Index pegs video at 51 percent of all traffic bound for mobile devices. But Cisco is counting on all traffic to mobile smartphones and tablets whether they’re connected to cellular or Wi-Fi networks. According to Cisco’s calculations one third of “mobile” traffic never hits the cell tower, traversing Wi-Fi networks instead.

Meanwhile, McAdam is claiming that half the load on its mobile airwaves is now video, which is frankly quite a lot. McAdam had a good explanation for why: LTE. As its customers move to LTE’s faster pipe, the video experience improves — buffering and choppiness drop away — which in turn encourages more video watching. In fact, a better connection seems to naturally begets more data usage in general. Only 23 percent of Verizon’s subscribers have an LTE device, but they account for well over 50 percent of Verizon’s network traffic.

I doubt Verizon is saddened by this development. As more customers start consuming more video they’ll have to upgrade (the ones that aren’t still clinging to their grandfathered unlimited plans, at least) to bigger data plans to handle that load.

But Verizon does face a perplexing problem. It’s doubtful many customers are going to start paying upwards of $100 a month for the 10 GB-plus data plans necessary to support hard-core video consumption. So while it wants to encourage its customers to consume more video, there are plenty of economic incentives convincing mobile subscribers to do the opposite.

That’s probably why we’ve been hearing McAdam talk up new mobile video technologies like LTE-broadcast lately. By streaming content to multiple users simultaneously – either for immediate or later consumption – Verizon can deliver more video at less cost. Theoretically, at least, it can pass those sizable savings on to its customers, thus encouraging mobile video’s growth.

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Based on hours viewed, tablets saw their usage grow 110 percent in 2012. Mobile phone video viewing grew 87 percent in that same time period. However, both device classes together still only accounted for 8.25 percent of all video viewing hours in December of 2012, compared to 4.15 percent at the beginning of the year. In comparison: Desktop viewing was still just shy of 90 percent in December.

There are a few things worth pointing out: The data for the report comes from Ooyala’s 150 biggest clients. Ooyala’s client roster includes names like Rolling Stone, ESPN and Vice (and yes, also GigaOM, check the bottom of this post for a disclaimer), and it claims to reach 200 million monthly unique viewers.

However, the company doesn’t have any relations with Netflix or YouTube, which are two of the biggest video traffic sources on the internet. That means that Ooyala’s data may be more reflective of the way we use video from big web publishers, as opposed to video services like Netflix.

Still, even with that caveat, it’s interesting to see how mobile is growing, and when: Ooyala reported a temporary spike of 73 percent for tablets on Christmas day alone.

Disclosure: GigaOM has a commercial relationship with Ooyala for the delivery of its video content.

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NSN is partnering with IBM to embed the latter’s WebSphere applications hosting servers into its future base station design, with the idea of turning the radio access network into both a baseband processing and computing platform. Putting content closer to the consumer isn’t a new concept in mobile – Ericsson and Akamai teamed up two years ago to do just that – but NSN is talking about a lot more than just caching video or routing traffic more efficiently.

Mobile applications and radio infrastructure have always been walled off from one another – applications just barrel ahead onto their radio on-ramps oblivious to the highway traffic conditions ahead. What NSN proposes to do with Liquid Apps is to make those disparate portions of the network work in unison.

For example, mobile video today can be a precarious proposition. As video viewers rack up in a particular cell, the network will keep trying to cram those video streams into the same limited airwaves, The result is a backed-up network with no one getting a quality video stream – or any stream at all. By processing video at the cell site, though, the base station could make decisions how to deliver those individual video feeds based on the prevailing network conditions.

If the cell is congested, then the base station downgrades the video quality of every stream, ensuring everyone sees a decent-quality picture. And as users gradually vacate the cell, the base station could gradually boost video quality for those that remain.

The architecture could also produce some noticeable increases in performance, say, if a subscriber was playing a network-based game. Instead of reaching across the many nodes of the backhaul, transport and core networks – as well as the Internet itself – a game hosted at the base station would have near zero latency, making the possibility of network-hosted, fast-twitch, real-time action game feasible.

Ironically, Liquid Apps is going in the opposite direction of NSN’s overall network strategy. In the last few years, NSN has promoted the concept of a cloud-based architecture, called Liquid Radio, where much of the intelligence and raw processing power of the network leaves the cell-site and becomes a virtualized set of shared resources. At NSN’s press conference on Sunday, mobile broadband chief Marc Rouanne said that the two approaches actually complement, rather than contradict, one another.

“We need computing capacity at both ends,” Rouanne said. “That’s what operators love about it.” NSN’s Liquid fabric has never called for excising processing capabilities completely from the cell site. Instead Liquid Radio is redistributing the intelligence of the network throughout the edge and core, allowing – as its name implies – to flow to wherever its most needed. Rouanne said, NSN now is taking the same approach to applications: relocating a portion of them from the core to the network fringes.

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Today’s mobile networks are rife with various forms of traffic shaping and optimization platforms, from transcoding/transrating technologies that cull out extraneous video bits to policy enforcement engines that prioritize certain types of traffic — or certain subscribers — through the length and breadth of the network.

Those technologies all differ in the techniques used and the specific traffic they target, but they all share the goal of trying to ease the mounting deluge of mobile traffic piling up on carrier airwaves. Where Vasona distinguishes itself from the lot is in the level of precision it can target with its traffic shaping techniques, said Biren Sood, CEO of the Santa Clara, Calif.,-based company.

Most optimization technologies apply the work across entire classes of data in the network core, or they follow specific subscribers as they move to and fro, throttling back their speeds or compressing their videos regardless of the prevailing network conditions.

But Sood said that the network should be treated as a collection of its parts, rather than as a unified whole. Congestion occurs at the individual cell, so carriers should optimize their networks accordingly, applying traffic management techniques only where congestion dictates, Sood said.

“We understand the nature of the cell, and we understand the capacity of the cell,” Sood said. “With that understanding we can get the right bits to the right applications in the most efficient way.”

Vasona’s kit sits in between the radio and core networks where it monitors the congestion level of its associated cells as well as all of the inbound and outbound traffic streams to those cells. If a cell starts getting crowded, Vasona will start tinkering with mix of traffic going to that cell, for instance prioritizing streaming bits over a file download or tossing out extraneous information in a video, Sood said. Once the congestion in a particular clears, Vasona’s tinker stops, Sood said.

While the company has been flying under the radar for the last few years, it has been busy raising funds and talking to potential customers. So far it has raised $9.8 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and New Venture Partners, and according to Sood its technology is already in a handful of global mobile networks, though he wouldn’t reveal specific customers.

Vasona is playing in a very crowded space. As smartphones proliferate, and consumers and app developers start increasing their mobile data usage, carriers are looking for ways to alleviate to alleviate that demand. In many cases they’re targeting their customers’ habits directly, introducing stricter data caps, throttling back speeds or banning specific applications. But behind the scenes tweaking their networks with bandwidth optimization technologies.

All of the major infrastructure vendors have either developed or bought their own traffic shaping platforms — most recently Cisco Systems bought BroadHop and Citrix(ctrx) bought ByteMobile — joining an already large field of traffic management specialists like Aircom International, Allot Communications, Sandvine and Openet (which recently raised $21 million). A growing number of startups like Vantrix and Skyfire are specifically targeting the problem of mobile video.

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By broadcast, McAdam was referring to LTE-broadcast, one of the many multicast technologies that’s been kicking around the wireless industry for years. LTE-broadcast would turn cell towers into the equivalent of mini-digital TV towers that could multicast video, audio and even data to multiple users simultaneously.

Right now mobile multimedia works through an on-demand unicast model. Every time you stream a video or a song to your smartphone, you get your own dedicated portion of the cell’s capacity to deliver your content, even if the guy right next to you is watching the same program. That unicast model and video’s intensive bandwidth demands explain why mobile video is such a network hog.

LTE-broadcast, however, would turn a portion of a network’s bandwidth into a multicast network, sending a single video or audio stream to multiple devices similar to the way TV and radio towers broadcast their programming.

If this all sounds familiar, you’re probably recalling Qualcomm’s FLO TV service of the last decade, which shut down in 2010 for lack of subscribers, devices and compelling content. Or perhaps the TV broadcasters’ own Dyle mobile digital TV initiative, which appears to be going nowhere very slowly. But there are some pretty key differences between those efforts and the LTE-broadcast technology that McAdam is talking about.

Qualcomm’s FLO technology required (and Dyle requires) a special receiver and therefore a dedicated TV handset to receive their respective transmissions. That pretty much doomed them from the beginning. But LTE-broadcast is based on the evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) technology being standardized for LTE. Chipmakers like Qualcomm have already committed to supporting eMBMS in their future radio silicon. That means future handsets will be pretty much eMBMS-ready whether carriers chose to use the technology or not.

eMBMS also uses the same LTE radio infrastructure, requiring only upgrades to the network core. So if a carrier decides to get into the broadcast business, the equipment is largely in place. The barriers to entry are much lower for LTE-broadcast, but there’s still one big question: will consumers actually use it?

The age of personalized multimedia

The problem is that an increasingly technically savvy public is moving away from broadcast models completely when it comes to digital content. Consumers are personalizing their radios with Pandora and Spotify. The reason HBO Go rocks is we don’t have to be at home a pre-determined hour –- or set our DVRs –- to watch the next episode of Game of Thrones. We just pull content out of the air whenever we please.

There are still plenty of people consuming broadcast video and audio on their TVs and car stereos, but on smartphones and tablets streaming is king. By imposing a broadcast model, carriers would be going against mobile data trends.

That’s why McAdam highlighted the Super Bowl as the ideal use case for LTE-broadcast. Blockbuster live events would attract hundreds of thousands of simultaneous viewers that would best make use of the technology. Verizon already streams entire NFL games through its NFL Mobile app, so being able to multicast those games would save it enormous amounts of network capacity — or so you might think.

There are a lot of cells out there

The thing about mobile networks is that they’re much denser than TV broadcast networks. Instead of using a single tower to cover a whole city, hundreds if not thousands of towers — each sporting multiple sectors — blanket any given metropolis with mobile broadband. Even if thousands of people in the same city are watching the same game on their phones, chances are few of them are going to be in the same cells at the same time. Multicasting effectively becomes unicasting if there is only one person receiving the transmission.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ conception of a heterogeneous network

What’s more, cells will start shrinking and multiplying as carriers begin deploying small cells and heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures. The more cells in the networks, the less chance you’ll have users simultaneously streaming the same content in any given cell, unless you’re talking about big events. But playoff games and the State of the Union Addresses don’t occur everyday.

According to a new research report from iGR, carriers are weighing those factors, and some of them are leaning towards deploying LTE-broadcast selectively, targeting venues where people are most likely to stream the same content. Airports would be a good example, but so would a sports arena. Ticketholders might be watching the same games live, but they could all view the same replay videos simultaneously.

The iGR report also proposes that LTE-broadcast could turn our phones and tablets into mobile DVRs. We could subscribe to particular TV programs on apps like HBO Go. At set times, the LTE-broadcast network would schedule the download of various shows, beaming them down to thousands if not millions of devices simultaneously and caching them for later consumption. There’s nothing to prevent LTE-broadcast from being used for other types of media or data like digital magazines or device OS updates.

iGR projects that mobile video will account for 71 percent of mobile network data traffic in 2016. By utilizing LTE-broadcast, the study concludes, carriers could reduce capacity demand on their networks by 12.5 percent overall and by 15 percent at peak hours, the study found. The bottom line is unicast on-demand video will remain supreme, but a 15 percent capacity savings when the network needs it most is certainly nothing to scoff at.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Peter Sobolev

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Miro has been offering its video converter as a standalone, one-click conversion tool for some time. However, previous versions only supported the conversion of one file at a time, which made it pretty much unusable if you had a larger collection of files. The new version makes it possible to drag and drop a number of videos onto the app and then simply start to convert them all with the same settings.

Of course, Miro Video Converter isn’t the only tool helping you to tweak your videos to play on mobile devices. Recently, Plex added an option to sync videos onto iOS devices for offline playback, which includes automatic transcoding, and apps like doubleTwist support similar functionality for Android users as well.

However, the beauty of the Miro Video Converter is its simplicity: If all you want to do is convert a few videos, it doesn’t get any easier than this.

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We’ve previously noted that in the U.S. more than 50 percent of the population has a smartphone, so the growth opportunity for first-time smartphone buyers is actually declining. Sales of smartphones in other regions are on the rise, however, with smartphone sales accounting for 40 percent of all mobile phones sold in the last quarter according to Ericsson. The top activities on handsets are adding to the data demand: web browsing and video consumption comprise around 35 percent of all smartphone data usage. And already about half of all video consumption on a smartphone takes place outside the home on a mobile network.

Those usage figures rise higher on the larger displays of tablets. Ericsson says that 40 percent of all mobile data used on tablets is due to growth in online video activities.

I noted this back in August with my somewhat outlandish prediction that small tablets will eventually replace smartphones. The larger the screen — but still portable, of course — the more immersive and enjoyable the video consumption experience can be.

Ericsson also notes the current shift to HSPA+ and LTE around the world as these faster, more efficient data networks are needed to keep up with demand. By the end of this year, an estimated 55 million subscribers will use LTE, for example, but that number will quickly grow to 1.6 billion  by 2018. In the meantime, however, WCDMA/HSPA networks are shouldering the transitional load with more growth in subscribers than LTE as carriers have to build out new infrastructure for LTE coverage for our mobile screens.

Granted, Ericcson is a major seller of networking equipment, so it stands to benefit from such growth. So perhaps a little skepticism is warranted on the details, but the trends appear sound to me. In fact, mobile operators are likely to be happy with such forecasts as more mobile device sales growth fuels the rallying cry of “spectrum shortage!” However, these same operators are capping mobile broadband plans which Dean Bubly notes on his Disruptive Wireless blog could actually limit growth while helping carriers optimize billing and usage.

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But New York City startup GorillaSpot Media has created a new mobile video app called Cliptamatic that looks to combine some of the short communications and sharing of Twitter with branded premium video like Hulu. The goal is to make concise premium video a kind of language that inspires reactions and gets people talking. The app, available for the iPhone, will start with a limited selection of election news, sports and comedy clips, usually no more than 30 seconds long, but will soon expand to movies and TV content.

Here’s how it works: users can choose to follow sports clips from the Big Ten Network to start, subscribing to their favorite conference team’s channel or they can choose from a variety of 2012 election issues, which includes curated content selected by GorillaSpot. There’s also comedy content from Latham Entertainment, which owns the Kings of Comedy and other properties and provides channels for Bernie Mac, George Lopez, Steve Harvey and other comedians. When new clips become available, users get alerted based on their subscriptions. They can also follow other users and see what they’re sharing or find what’s popular in the Cliptamatic network.

When a user finds a video they like, they can easily share it out to Facebook or the Cliptamatic feed with their own caption. The videos will run inside Facebook. Twitter integration is coming soon.

Cliptamatic has limited utility at launch because of its smaller library of content. And if it stays this small, it’s not going to be very useful for people. But there’s reason to believe this can be a more widely used tool because of GorillaSpot’s experience in the premium video world. GorillaSpot, for the last five years, has worked with studios and TV networks, such as Paramount, ABC, CBS, MTV, HBO, AMC, MLB and others, for its products, which include SceneWeaver, a video mashup application, and ReelCards, which provides online premium video e-cards. The company plans on rolling out film and TV content in the coming weeks and months, with many TV clips uploaded within minutes of their airing.

Athan Stephanopoulos, CEO & Founder of GorillaSpot told me GorillaSpot has already done a lot of heavy lifting with content owners and shown them how they can monetize their clips in a safe way. Now, he believes many more will be interested in teaming up on Cliptamatic. Some TV networks may release clips, with short 3-second post rolls that promote a current show. Other movie studios may just want to point to their archive of content. And some media companies may just want to get in now to help build Cliptamatic up into a larger sharing platform.

Stephanopoulos believes that there’s a ripe opportunity in creating a social video sharing service that is built specifically with mobile in mind, so consumption and distribution is easy. And he said premium content is capable of expressing people’s feelings in ways that user-generated content can’t convey.

“We’re trying to create a simple experience for finding content that’s relevant to you that helps you elevate your social conversation,” Stephanopoulos said. “Hulu is like a full meal while YouTube is like an appetizer, but we’re trying to provide the best bite of a meal.”

I think there’s definitely a place for Cliptamatic if it can score the right content. Video is a great conversation starter and tool for expression but I hesitate to use it sometimes because a clip may be too long or I can’t find the right video. And doing it from a mobile device makes it even harder. But if I could find the perfect Will Farrell quote from Anchorman or an illuminating clip from the upcoming debates that, I would love to share it at the right time. Movieclips has some great clips, which are available through YouTube as well, but they’re often a couple minutes long or more and there’s no mobile app.

We’re already used to sharing longer videos on Twitter and Facebook but I think we could see a lot more of that if the content was better packaged for quick sharing. And with the popularity of gifs these days, we’re understanding how short video moments are becoming a form of expression.

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Shiva Rajaraman, YouTube’s director of product management, joined our video reporter Janko Roettgers at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference to explain the company’s view of mobile.

Screens are everywhere, Pages are dead

According to Rajaraman, 25 percent of YouTube videos are being watched on mobile devices and the number is accelerating rapidly. In some markets, like Korea, that figure is already at 50 percent. Rajaraman attributes this rise to everything from larger screen sizes, more 3G and 4G networks, and consumers turning to tablets over desktops for info and entertainment.

For content makers, this means that creating a video channel page in a “classically desktop” design is folly. Pages with links, browser bars and other desktop architecture just doesn’t belong in a video environment, says Rararaman.

“Pages are dead,” he says. “It’s all about fluidity and a full screen model.. like TV.”

This means that YouTube’s partners have had to adjust to how their content is presented — and where it appears. While the site once let video makers publish to discrete devices, now their only choice for syndication is monetized or non-monetized platforms. The reason for this is that YouTube wanted to put a stop to the “odd experience” where a video shared from a desktop can’t be seen on a mobile device. Rajaraman said the channels must be everywhere in the same way that your friends are always there on a social network no matter which platform you use.

But what about monetization?

Unlike display ads, which have proved a rocky fit on smaller screens, video ads have made a smoother transition. Rajaraman says that YouTube’s plan is to continue scaling its skippable pre-roll ads across all devices where people watch them as part of a fluid package of content.

He also noted that while the format of online video resembles TV, the advertising environment is much less restriced. Ad makers are not constrained by artificial 15 or 30 second windows and that the possibilities for execution are much broader. Rajaraman observes, for instance, that advertisers trying to induce a call to action (like asking a viewer to go to a web page) can try to reach the target with one big splash rather than using conventional TVs tactic of bombarding the target with the same ad.

Audience members asked if the video ecosystem is threatened by phone carriers’ increasingly strict limits on data usage. Rajaraman said that YouTube was looking for ways to “uncap” people but that the company for now is not disclosing how much content is consumed on Wi-Fi versus on phone networks.

He also suggested that YouTube was in the process of developing something analogous to Apple Airplay for Android.

On the broader picture of how consumers will interact with video content in the future, Rajaraman said that TV will be used for display and mobile devices for discovery.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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Three different carriers. Three completely different approaches to the market. The only thing they have in common — besides being part of the newest wave of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOS) — is that they are questioning long-accepted mobile business models. As mobile evolves from a carrier-dominated, vertically integrated and voice-centric industry into a more inclusive, data-focused one, they’re making the case that our fundamental notions of what a carrier is and what it provides should evolve as well.

That transformation will be a major theme at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference next month in San Francisco. David Morken, CEO of Bandwith.com (Republic’s parent); Scott Bendar, co-founder and CTO of FreedomPop; and Ahmed Khattak, co-founder and CEO of GSM Nation will be on the stage at Mobilize to debate the merits of their new approaches to wireless market.

But the transformation of the industry isn’t just limited to carriers. The switch from voice to data has led every link in the mobile value chain to question assumptions formed when the world used wireline networks for data and mobile networks for voice. Device makers have changed the way handsets are designed. Internet companies are grappling with the fact that their customers are moving away from the PC to small-screen devices, with their limited real estate and more challenging revenue models. And infrastructure makers and carriers are re-architecting the fundamental topologies of their networks.

We’re seeing examples of it all over the industry. Facebook’s IPO was clouded by the revelation that it had no idea how to port its advertising-based revenue model over to mobile phones. A growing number of developers are looking to mobile as their first and sometimes only platform. For a company like Foursquared the smartphone isn’t so much a telephony or a computing platform as it is an extension of its owner’s presence in the world. Path (whose CEO Dave Morin is also speaking at Mobilize) has discounted the PC completely, believing the future of social networking relies solely on mobile devices.

In handsets, device makers are grappling with new form factors and users interfaces as the phones original primary function, voice calls, falls to the wayside and the need to create a more immersive data experience comes to the forefront. New large-screened devices like Samsung’s Galaxy Note are blurring the distinction between smartphone and tablet, and my colleague Kevin Tofel believes that one day tablets will replace the smartphone entirely.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ conception of a heterogeneous network

On the network side, carriers and their infrastructure vendors have begun realizing that the big t0wer-based macro-umbrella networks that fueled two decades of voice services aren’t going to cut it in a data-centric world. They’re designing new types of small cells and base stations intended to deliver intense levels of bandwidth over limited areas. Those small cell deployments will eventually evolve into the new heterogeneous network, or HetNet, which will transform cellular systems from coverage-to capacity-focused topologies. Today’s carrier networks have tens of thousands of cells. Future networks will hundreds of thousands if not millions of cells.

The next few years are going to be tumultuous as we negotiate these seismic shifts from mobile voice to mobile data and from the PC-centric to the mobile-centric Internet. Not every MVNO, app developer and infrastructure maker is going to make it. We’ve already seen a big shakeup on the equipment side (Nokia decline and the dissolution of Motorola and Nortel Networks), and the big incumbent mobile operators are struggling to understand their role in the mobile broadband age.

At Mobilize, we’ll be tackling a raft of topics related to that transformation. Here are a just a few speakers to look out for:

• The technology gurus of two major carriers will be in attendance. Sprint CTO Stephen Bye and T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray will discuss their aggressive plans to overhaul their respective carrier’s networks. T-Mobile and Sprint aren’t just launching LTE, they’re actively shutting down large swathes of their 2G networks, and in Sprint’s case, pursuing new small cell and heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures.
• Samsung has always been a mover and shaker in the handset market, but the rise of the smartphone turned it into the world’s largest mobile device maker. Samsung VP of Global Product Innovation Yoon Lee will discuss with GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham how build on that lead and challenge the ever-present Apple.
• Dealing with constantly fluctuating connection speeds – or no data connections – offline synching and huge array of different operating systems are problems with which the old internet didn’t have to cope. Parse CTO Kevin Lacker will discuss how mobile devices becoming the endpoints of the Internet has made the industry rethink the PC-centered models on which data services were built.

Featured photo courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

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