@ CTIA: Mobile Video Providers Have Different Strategies, But Share The Same Bullish Outlook

The question “what is mobile TV?” seems pretty straightforward, but it’s actually pretty complicated, given the wide array of mobile video services — linear mobile broadcasts, unicast streams, downloaded short clips — that get lumped together under the mobile TV banner. Despite their different approaches and strategies, execs from companies like MediaFLO, NBC Universal, MobiTV, and Discovery Communications (NSDQ: DISCA) all expressed a bullish outlook on the mobile video market at the TV on the Go: Leveraging Mobility to Meet Consumer Demand for Video Content panel at CTIA.

The MediaFLO and MobiTV reps both made the point that they wanted their products to follow the footsteps of standard television broadcasts because it was familiar to consumers — and obviously very popular. But Michael Barlow, the CEO of Alcatel-Lucent PacketVideo Networks, made the point that TV itself is changing, thanks to DVRs and the shift to an IP environment, and that mobile TV and video perhaps shouldn’t directly emulate standard TV broadcasts and models, and needs to have the flexibility to deliver consumers the content they want in the format they want. “In the end, you’re going to have many screens, beyond three screens,” he said. “It’s your content, delivered to you. It’s personalized, you can interact with it, you can share it.

Direct and indirect value: Douglas Craig, Discovery’s SVP of new media programming, made the point that for traditional broadcasters, mobile content can have significant promotional value in addition to direct financial value. Even if the mobile (or other digital) content can’t be directly monetized, it can drive viewers to other channels and platforms that can be. “We’re always looking for ways to extend our reach and find the next generation of Discovery viewer,” he said. He later added that “it’s one thing to pay for a phone as a communications device, but it’s another to pay for content on that phone.” For Discovery, that may not be such a problem, if it can use mobile content to increase the audience of its traditional platforms.

Broadcast vs. unicast: It’s hard to have a discussion about mobile video without somebody bringing up the question of network capacity, and whether broadcasting or unicasting is the right technical model to use. Ray DeRenzo, the VP of business development at MobiTV, said that capacity isn’t that big an issue, particularly for niche content. “If everybody in Paris flushed their toilet at the same time, you’d have a problem,” he said, adding that it’s an unlikely scenario. It’s a similar story for mobile video, and there’s plenty of room in the market to support both broadcast and unicast solutions and adapt content to the right technology.

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