What flies and why was the hot topic at today’s iHollywood Mobile Europe even, a day of sessions and seminars in Barcelona running parallel to 3GSM. Should mobile TV be served up in the form of mobisodes, full-length programs/movies, or something else? There are no easy answers, but senior execs from major television and movie companies, including Disney, HBO, ABC, NBC and Sony, as well as a good cross section of operators and enablers, had some surprising views based on their deployments and consumer research.
Giving users more control over their content is at the core of HBO International’s mobile TV strategy, according to Stanley Fertig, SVP of HBO International. In South Korea, for example, HBO launched a mobile VOD offer in December with SK Telecom that bundles four episodes of Sex in the City and another four episodes of Six Feet Under with full VCR capability for a monthly fee of 2 euros ($2.60) a month. Fertig said the world-first service, which remembers where users left off watching the program and allows them to pick up at that point, is “a particularly good model for TV on mobile” because it’s aligned with today’s technology and tariffs, as well as users’ TV snacking behavior. Fertig: “We adopted this model because mobile viewing is not appointment viewing. The user can always get to a bigger screen. When users watch TV on mobile there has to be the option to watch it on demand.”
But do users want full-length TV shows? Dilip Bala, VP-business development at ABC Entertainment/Touchstone Television, wasn’t so sure: “We don’t yet know how users want to consume video. Should it be long shows, short segments, live programming or time-shifted? That’s not clear
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