Video On Mobiles & What It Means For Us

Author:

Jack

Date:

Wed, 29/03/2006 - 10:54

Category:

This morning, BBC News 24 carried a story about sending TV news to mobile phones. Apparently the good guys and gals at the BBC Interactive department have been looking at ways of sending TV news to mobile phones. They ran a test in Oxford. Pete Clifton from BBC Interactive said that the Oxford test "...showed that people would use a handheld device to watch the news in video and it's our plan over the next year to roll out more of these video services to good devices around the country".

I'm sure I'm not the only person who's cynical about "video on mobiles". I suspect the main driving force behind this development is the huge bill the mobile phone companies had to pay for their 3G licenses and now they're struggling to find ways to make consumers use (and hence pay for) the bandwidth offered by 3G. Video is great way to eat up tonnes of bandwidth.

But what I'm really sceptical about is whether or not people actually want to watch video on tiny little mobile screens. Personally, I struggle to find the time to listen to one or two podcasts a week and podcasts have the great advantage that you can listen to them whilst you're doing your shopping or navigating your way through the public transport system in rush hour. You can only watch video on a phone when you're stationary and able to give your full attention to your phone. I very much doubt I'll be watching very much video on my phone at all. I know a few people with video iPods and they never use them for watching video. Would you want to watch video on a phone screen?

This discussion is very important for us filmmakers because a lot of us spend a large proportion of our time and effort creating short-form pieces like music videos and short films. Some people have been saying that the video iPod and video-on-mobiles will open up a huge new market for short films and music videos. As someone who makes shorts and MVs, I certainly would welcome the introduction of a new market for these films but I'm sceptical that new market will be found on handheld devices. Personally, I think our best hope for finding new ways to distribute all types of films will come when significant numbers of people start hooking their TVs up to home-theatre-PCs. Then we'll see a large increase in the use of the Internet to distribute high-quality video to the viewer.

Video On Mobiles & What It Means For Us

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