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February 2009 | Volume 12/ Number 2
The Next Wave Redux

Delivering Mobile Video Services

Mobile video is perhaps the biggest opportunity of the next decade but it’s also the least standardized and therefore difficult to do well.

Video over dedicated networks is well established. Cable companies have been at it for years and now phone companies are in the game. Both require substantial capital, but technologies are readily available and well understood.

Video over the Internet is more recent, but also well understood with dozens and dozens of Internet video services (like YouTube (News - Alert)) in existence.

Meanwhile mobile video remains a fledgling market. The problem is extreme diversity among mobile devices. Video-enabled handsets vary in resolution, supported video coders, programming environments, browser capabilities and the extent to which it’s even possible to access 3rd party applications or content. In addition, bandwidth varies depending upon location and time of day. So the Internet approach, of adapting user content once when it’s ingested and then relying on standard web browsers, won’t work. Adaptation is required each time a video is played.




Despite these difficulties, mobile video promises to be enormous. Everyone carries a mobile phone and, just as camera phones became ubiquitous, the baseline mobile handset will gain powerful video capabilities — video recording as well as viewing. Expect a portable webcam in everyone’s pocket. What’s more, competition among four to five 3G networks (in the U.S. by 2010) will lead to affordable mobile Internet access and an explosion in new applications as Internet players scramble to interact with mobile individuals. How will Internet developers deal with diverse mobile devices and varying bandwidth? Several companies are lining up to fill the gap.

RipCode and Avot Media are each offering video content adaptors as appliances while Nellymoser offers a mobile services platform that includes video content adaption. Media Excel (News - Alert) comes at the problem from a focus on mobile TV but they too have noticed the advent of user generated video.

It’s still early. Only 4 percent of U.S. users subscribe to video services. High speed access can be spotty. Operators are just beginning to open up. But the landscape is changing rapidly. The next 24 months will be exciting! IT

Brough Turner is Chief Strategy Officer of Dialogic (News - Alert) (www.dialogic.com).

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