Streaming Media - August/September 2007 - (Page 86)

Mobile Video at Last h Emerging Media ere’s an experiment: Dig your old Pentium out of the closet—preferably some 200–400MHz unit. Connect it to broadband. Download the latest browser and Flash player. Go to YouTube. Watch some videos. It might work—kind of. But viewing video on that machine would make you long for a “real” computer. Now imagine your monitor was about 2” wide, that your machine wasn’t as fast as your 200MHz Pentium, and your internet connection was flaky. Now you’re talking about the sorry state of mobile video until recent times. A recent survey said the biggest complaint people have about mobile video is “bad user experience,” which is another way of saying “it didn’t work.” The problem for technology innovators is how to get to the stable version 2.0 without passing through the painful 1.0 stage. In many cases you just can’t. But you can bet that the mobile phone companies, handset manufacturers, and content aggregators never intended their mobile video initiatives to be a million-person beta test. Why has it been so difficult to achieve compelling mobile video? Well, the math is simple: Phones need to be as cheap as possible so people will buy them. Video requires special video decoder chips, which add cost. But even with cheap chips, the phone itself has to download video smoothly and quickly—which requires a good network connection and a fast processor. Both of these cost money too—a lot. EVDO is plenty fast for the kind of video we’ve been trying to make work. But the fastest “smart” phones have a processor around 500Mhz, which pales in comparison to its desktop equivalent. So just getting those frames off the server is a struggle for these smart little phones. And when you try to stream the video instead of downloading it—on the inherently unstable network that is cellular—you’ve got too much stacked against a great user experience. It’s well known that the originators of new technology often fail to capitalize on its success. The innovators, usually passionate about the invention and not the business, will push the boundaries of what can be done. But their proofs of concept often wither in the marketplace— sometimes because of bad business, and sometimes just because the technology isn’t ripe. Fortunately, I believe the “inflection point” where mobile video will flourish has arrived. Several factors seem to point to this favorable technology climate: • Wireless carriers are getting their own broadband pricing under control with newer technologies. EVDO isn’t the only wireless broadband anymore. HSDPA (GSM networks, like AT&T) and WiMAX will compete and drive wireless broadband costs down. • The newest wireless broadband standards have very low latency— 86 STREAMING MEDIA August/September 2007 suitable for interactive applications like voice over IP and realtime conferencing. • IPhone is paving the way to the “real web” by putting a standards-compliant desktop browser in a phone. • AT&T is coming out with mobile-to-mobile (one-way only, unfortunately) video conferencing devices built on its 3.5G network. • Intel and AMD are pushing to get x86 chips down small enough to fit in phones. It won’t happen next year, but by the time a 1.5GHz Pentium motherboard fits in a handheld computer, you know mobile phones will have better chips as well. • Transcoding tools are becoming a Web 2.0 commodity. • Touch interfaces and hideaway keyboards are maturing, and thus there’s a way to get mobile phone screens down to a reasonable size. By Damien Stolarz For those of you tinkering with mobile video startups in your garages, hurrah! Your time has come! But it’s not going to be easy. Many entrepreneurs dream that their company is going to be the YouTube for mobiles. But YouTube is probably going to be the YouTube for mobiles; they’ve now got Google’s army of engineers behind them, and they have also noticed that now would be a good time to work on phones. But there’s still so much innovation to be done. There are cross-carrier boundaries to overcome. There are web-to-mobile and mobile-to-web and mobile-to-TV applications, all made possible by increasing CPU power and, more importantly, consumer awareness. There’s the world of telepresence and business-related live conferencing. The usual suspects—Apple, Google—won’t pursue all these areas, and even if they do, can’t do all of them well. It’s now more than possible to deliver a compelling video experience on a phone—it’s possible that someone outside of your laboratory might be able to experience it too. Perhaps we’ll finally be able to buy that Dick Tracy video-conferencing wristwatch while someone’s still young enough to know who Dick Tracy is. Damien Stolarz (www.damienstolarz.com) is an emerging technology and media consultant and the author of several books including Hands-On Guide to Video Blogging and Podcasting (Focal Press). Comments? Email us at letters@streamingmedia.com, or check the masthead for other ways to contact us. http://www.damienstolarz.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Streaming Media - August/September 2007

Table of Contents Sweet Sixteen Letters to the Editor Technology and Business Trends IBM Takes Webcasting to the Desktop ROI in the EDU Bank Serves Espresso, Enterprise Video Online Video Advertising: Hit or Miss MLB’s Foul Bawl A Crash Course in Flash Video Newspapers in Multimedia Metamorphosis Webcasting Large Entertainment Events: Seeing Through the Hype Webcasting With Windows Media Can’t Start A Fire . . . A WiMAX Primer Mobile Video at Last Telestream Episode Pro Grass Valley ProCoder 3 Silverlight Is No Flash Killer

Streaming Media - August/September 2007

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