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Dialogic Talks Mobile Video

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March 20, 2009

Dialogic Talks Mobile Video

By Stefania Viscusi, Assignment Desk Editor


With the number of mobile users and the benefits of mobility increasing, the rate at which new mobile technologies are being introduced is also climbing.
 
Thanks to advanced networks and a market eager to consume new value-added services like mobile video for their communications and entertainment needs, the mobile video industry is expected to experience rapid growth over the next few years. For service providers, this also means the opportunity to increase revenues.

 
Dialogic Corporation, a company well known for providing innovative, open standards technologies for network service providers and enterprise communications networks, offers components that help enable multimedia services in both today's and tomorrow's networks. The company’s enabling technologies and tools provide developers with the ability to quickly produce profitable mobile applications.
 
To find out some more about mobile video, the future of the market, and Dialogic’s (News - Alert) offerings, I asked Jim Machi, Sr. VP of Marketing for Dialogic, a few questions on the topic.
 
What are the emerging markets for mobile video and what are the market projections for mobile video?

Developing countries now account for more than half of mobile subscriber growth worldwide. With that said, our business is seeing mobile video opportunities everywhere, but more specifically in Latin America, India and Eastern Europe. We anticipate the US ramping up on video mobile value added services relatively soon as well.

There are many projections for the mobile video market, all showing tremendous growth for obvious reasons – the mobile networks are increasingly able to support it, and the mobile devices are video enabled, so people will use them. Infonetics projects worldwide mobile video service revenue to increase at a 5-year CAGR by 130 percent, reaching $35 billion by 2011.
 
How will the growth of mobile services effect advertising and other revenue streams? 

Even in today’s economy, cell phone use is on the rise. In fact, people will simply not give up their cell phones. As mobile video becomes more ubiquitous, then there’s a natural opportunity for advertising to the video stream, perhaps to help defray the cost of the call itself, or perhaps as a way to change the fundamental business model. Think about going on the Internet today where there are small advertisements in part of the screen – something like this could occur in a mobile video call as well. 
 
How can mobile video be used to enhance business communications?

Mobile video services will have a tremendous impact on business productivity and business culture. Enhanced communication options, such as mobile video conferencing, will allow people in different cities or even continents to collaborate in a simple and timely way. Some examples of video-based business communications include:

 -- IVVR 
-- Conversation video
-- Video sharing between a business and its customers
-- Video training 
-- Video Messaging and video SMS 
-- Video conferencing

In an IVVR example, video could be part of the self-help option, and video could also be the way the menu is conveyed to the user – you could see the IVR menu on the screen as opposed to having to listen to the different prompts and remember the prompt number that fits your need.
 
What is the primary /potential user base for mobile videos?
 
The potential user base for mobile videos is huge – and varied. As more and more cool phones, applications and devices are developed, more and more people around the globe will start using mobile video. There are two buckets for video applications as I see it. One bucket is that applications that were previously voice or text enabled will become video enabled. Another bucket is related to video-only communication – surveillance cameras and sending a camera stream to a mobile phone is an example of this.  People could also start sending video e-mails and exchanging streaming videos from News Web sites. According to a report by NSR, mobile TV and mobile video services are projected to grow almost ten-fold from an estimated user base of over 57 million at the end of 2007 to 566 million users in 2013.
 
 
Do you see a rise in mobile video demand driving mobile usage plans?
 
Yes, as 3G networks continue to develop, and as 3G (and video enabled) phones are deployed, it’s natural that consumers will want to take advantage of the video capabilities. This, in turn, will drive usage plan changes, perhaps to bringing video calls in as part of the standard monthly usage fee, as opposed to having it as an add-on. That will ultimately happen in my opinion.
 
 
What were past or current obstacles for delivering mobile video? Are mobile networks capable of supporting widespread adoption?
 
One challenge is available bandwidth. I did some analysis a while ago and concluded at a very high level that 3G is 20 times “better” than EVDO, and LTE or WiMAX (News - Alert) would be about 20 times better than that.   So if everyone started using video today, its likely bandwidth would be hard to get and you couldn’t get a dial tone. This would be similar to say, everyone at a football game trying to make a call, but no one everyone maintaining a connection, since there are too many people at a single location. Another challenge is battery life. As the mobile device crunches more data, the batteries will be taxed. We will need better batteries. Another challenge in creating mobile video applications is making IP-based media work with TDM-based user devices. The 3G-324M standard is designed for TDM channels, but most video is targeted for IP networks, which are packet-switched networks. None of this is insurmountable.
 
What is Dialogic doing to drive the market?
 
Video components from Dialogic provide effective tools and environments for developing flexible and scalable mobile video applications. Many of our mobile Value Added Service customers are adding video to their offerings, so we’re providing the video engines to help them. Dialogic provides mobile video components and platforms that help meet the challenges of heterogeneous networks, endpoint diversity, video quality bandwidth constraints and interactivity, allowing application developers to enhance their innovative applications and create exciting, must-have, revenue-generating mobile video services. Our Dialogic Media Labs is also investing in video algorithmic work so that our video engines have perceptive quality and scalability over typical algorithms.
 
Can you talk a little about Dialogic’s longer term goals related to mobile video?
 
It’s pretty simple – we believe "Video is the New Voice™ "– that is, Dialogic’s vision is that all voice and text applications will eventually migrate to adding video capabilities, and also that there will be video only applications entering the mobile arena. So in the same way Dialogic become the major technology enabling player to our customers who provided voice, fax, and text applications, we believe we will be the major technology enabling player to those customers who want to provide mobile video applications. We’ve been in this market for quite a few years now and we have multiple products to support this vision.
 
For more, be sure to check out the Mobile Video channel on TMCnet.

Stefania Viscusi is an assignment editor for TMCnet, covering VoIP, CRM, call center and wireless technologies. To read more of Stefania’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi







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