Discovery’s Hopes With Mobiles

A story about Discovery Communications’ efforts with mobile content…it is ramping up its mobile video offerings in U.S. Discovery Mobile, to launch later this year on Sprint, will fill the small screen with its own mix of facts, travel news and bloody animal fights.
“The job of feeding content to small screens falls to a six-person team inside the new-media department. Four ‘preditors’ — industry short-hand for producers/writers/editors — create programming for websites and mobile phones, combing the companies’ hundreds of thousands of hours of footage for segments that can be knit into cellphone-size bits of up to two minutes. Instead of a two-hour documentary on zebras in the Serengeti, animal footage is more likely to take the form of “Top Five Takedowns,” which lets viewers vote by text message on their favorite clip of predators attacking prey.”
Discovery also hopes eventually to marry GPS with mobile commerce. It recently created a new business unit around its travel-related programming so that it can take advantage of the day when consumers can use phones to get information and make purchases based on their physical location, such as booking hotels or arranging audio tours of historic sites.

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