There appear to be many people after our attention. They want us watching their content, no sorry, paying for their content, and watching their advertisements. Even when in the bus.
So we have Mobile TV. I am really not sure if there is a market for it, but that hasn't stopped these ideas being hyped before so I don't think it will stop this one. It seems like a reasonable concept; watch TV anywhere, anytime. People love TV right?. It might even look okay with a iPhone or PSP type screen.
Behind the Mobile TV hype we have standards. MBMS, DVB-H, DMB, MediaFLO, and a few others bit players. All of these standards focus on a broadcast, or (as a concession to bandwidth) multicast model for delivery, and so I think all of them are missing the point.
The future is YouTube. People want to choose what to watch and when they watch it. If they get interrupted they want to pause it. They want to be able to share it with their friends in the same city, the same country, or on the same planet. They've got this freedom now and they won't forget about it, or accept that just because they are mobile they can't get it.
Apple seems to get this with their YouTube partnership, but the engineers in charge of the standards groups do not. I don't think they can see beyond the fact that unicasted content is a hideously inefficient model. It is a bare, naked, fact. Offering unicasted TV over the mobile infrastructure has the potential to suck up all the current mobile capacity serving only a tiny percentage of their customer base. It magnifies all the differences in load throughout the network e.g. CBD cell sites would overload during the day, but be idle at night when the urban cell sites would begin to overload. This kind of infrastructure costs big bucks to expand as you end up needing more physical sites, more antennas, more radio gear, and above all more connectivity from these remote sites to the core network.
Customers don't care. Every aspect of modern life, down to working hours, is becoming on-demand. Generation Y will not accept broadcast TV for much longer; TiVo and it's ilk are only a stepping stone to a full on-demand service. The shared experience of lives being worked around a central TV schedule is over. It's been talked about for years and YouTube accelerated it to fruition, even if it is worse than NTSC or PAL TV on a bad day.
There are other flaws in the standards proposed:
- MBMS soaks up huge amounts of capacity for a small number of channels. Think about returning to 3 channels everyone.
- DVB-H and MediaFLO require a new radio receiver in your phone, along with discrete chips etc etc. Yeah, like that'll work. I can imagine the small hole in that pitch: "I'll get you a million subscribers, but you'll have to give them all new phones or wait 3 years."
2 comments:
I think that if we get away from the idea of watching shows live, we'll see interesting things start to happen.
How about, if we treat the phone as a PVR? The user selects the shows, they are pushed down to the device as it is broadcast (multicast!) and then the user is free to pause/watch/play whenever they want.
Treating them like a PVR would also add a lot of value to offpeak bandwidth, since the carriers could push shows out at those times instead of during peak hours.
Live content could still be multicast (news/etc), but again with the tivo style, you end up with pause/etc controls while it still received multicast content from the network.
The trick is to do video on demand without actually doing it "on demand"
I agree. I am working on a followup post, the problem (as always) is know what to cache.
Now we can get 1GB SD cards for NZ$15 (!) I think we're at the point where devices are starting to have enough space for storage.
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