The mobile-video marketplace is oozing with applications.

 

But how does a mobile operator you get a piece of the profit? 

 

Lucky for those who ask, Ray Adensamer (News - Alert), senior product marketing manager at RadiSys, gave a couple of ideas during TMCnet’s recent Webinar, “3G Mobile Video Services Innovative Solutions for Mass Market Deployment.”

 

According to Adensamer, while the consumption of one-way video streaming services continues to grow, interactive two-way video communication services that ride on circuit-based video telephony 3G-324M standards present unique operational challenges for economical mass market deployment.

 

“In the 400 million CDMA phones out there, the large majority of them already have the 3G-324M stack in that device,” Adensamer told Webinar attendees. “So it’s just a matter of turning up these services, because the handsets already support them.”

 

However, doing 3G over a circuit-switch network can be a bit cost prohibitive.

 

One idea, said Adensamer, is to use an intermediary party like RadiSys (News - Alert) to break down the circuit signal into a packet-like one. Earlier this month, the company released its “Convedia Media Server” line, which allows service providers to support video processing on a single, common IP infrastructure and single-service delivery architecture. The technology works by converting circuits to the IP world, and circuit streaming into RTP-over-IP streaming, which is much less costly.

 

The “decomposition” of the circuit-switch data “improves resource utilization,” which in turn improves cost, Adensamer said.

 

Another way to save money is to focus on the applications that are most appropriate for a carrier’s subscriber base. To do this, said Adensamer, carriers need to ask themselves questions like, ‘What devices are out there?’ ‘Which subscribers have signed up for which services?’ Only then, can the focus shift to developing and implementing applications like video-ringbacks (where one caller’s video clip plays as the phone rings).

 

Carriers shouldn’t hesitate to look into advertising opportunities, and create new revenue streams to help subsidize video costs so more can be offered for less.

 

“The key point here,” said Adensamer, “is it allows mobile operators to generate revenue from new revenue sources.”