Some rants are so big they take two blog posts to handle. See yesterday's post for the warm up.
Such is my experience with mobile TV. And I do mean "experience." I literally have had access to dedicated mobile video services and live mobile TV from the days they were first offered. For months I
kept with me the first Verizon VCast 3G phones back when they had an antenna. I did the same with the first iterations of Sprint TV on 3G (again VOD) and the Qualcomm FloTV units from Verizon and
AT&T. I have even had review laptops with built-in TV tuners and HDTV dongles to pull in hi-res over-air transmissions. While it is true of all technologies, mobile media especially is reliant on
consumers making habitual use of a platform. Even I thought the notion of having live or on-demand TV in my pocket or my backpack was cool as all hell. I pushed every new handset and device on my
daughter and girlfriend to see if they shared my enthusiasm.
"Okay, when are you going to use it?" my daughter asked. It was good for her in the passenger seat ("Ooh, look SpongeBob," she
squealed) but when exactly would I be away from a TV or PC monitor long enough to need an in-between screen to fill the void?" Even TV-enabled laptops most often were used at home, in hotel rooms with
better TV screens available, etc.
In practice, my daughter's quip proved dead on. In years of carrying mobile TV of all sorts, I usually forgot I had it. And while some of the technologies like
FloTV were impressive in the near instant-on snappiness, there just weren't a lot of instances where it was practical to turn on a portable TV. Waiting room? Really? Unless you are packing headphones,
you are sharing your TV tastes with the people around you. On the commute? Well, maybe - again if you come prepared not to share and if your provider really can hold a fat bandwidth on a moving train
or bus. Lunch back at the office seems like a best case scenario during the day for mobile TV. It is not surprising that mobile video ad networks like Rhythm New Media find that much of mobile video
consumption often happens during prime time - likely at home.
As comments on yesterday's rant (or half-rant) pointed out, the new mobile TV consortium of broadcasters likely has its sights set
beyond smart phones and onto multiple portable devices like tablets and in-car devices. I agree, but I don't see that the going is any smoother on these devices either. First, the consortium will have
to pursue these other devices because for obvious business reasons the handset manufacturers will be slow to adopt, even though they represent the greatest market penetration. Even on tablets, laptops
and in-car we are still facing usage scenarios that are much more incremental, fragmented and haphazard than the 70-year tradition of lean-back TV. Applying the same content and business model of the
last century to an on demand and mobilized world of content use makes great sense for media moguls and advertisers. For consumers? Time shifting has already demonstrated that the old models of
broadcasting are permanently changed. Mobility accelerates all of that in ways we can't yet anticipate.
And then there is the issue of the video programming itself. VOD allows the user to
pick and choose short clips at will, and that seems to be the form that has some legs now on any mobile platform. I myself have watched full episodes of SNL and substantial pieces of Netflix films on
my iPhone.
But how well does a live TV stream map against the video snacking model most mobile content providers assume is the use case for this platform? The mobile TV consortium that
announced yesterday it would enable live broadcasting to mobile devices in select markets next year suggests that good old TV-as-we-know-it should be available everywhere in its basic form. But if I
have a few minutes to kill and want to fire up the smart phone to catch up on the latest headlines, what are the chances that I actually will drop into exactly that in a live stream? The Weather
Channel is the only TV content provider that is programmed for drive-by viewing. Local weather "on the eights" assures the channel surfer they can get the content they most want on a tight rotation
that makes sense for the use case. But in most other cases, however, I could hit headline news during a human interest story on a Turkey bowling festival in DeMoines or worse a lengthy ad pod.
Meanwhile the dentist is ready to see me now. Time to put away the phone. Even on larger screen devices, mobility still means opportunistic and relatively unpredictable grabbing of media. The last
century's model of TV programming (and even radio programming) were grounded in social rituals in day parts followed by mass audiences. Mobility in any form (phone or tablet) is personalization
brought to its extreme. It is anathema to mass media - to broadcasting as we have known it for a century.
Frankly the inherent and obvious limitations of serving a raw TV feed to mobile
handsets or screens occurred to the likes of FloTV and MobiTV years ago, and they adjusted their programming accordingly. Many of these early in providers started experimenting with truncated
programming from the prime time schedule that was aimed at ten and twenty minute usage spans. Mobile platforms require content shaped to mobile use cases, mobile attention spans, mobile settings. I am
not sure what precisely this Mobile TV consortium of broadcasters really has in mind content-wise. But if they think they will get away with simply redirecting their broadcast to a new generation of
devices that carry with them very different use cases, then my guess is we will discover quickly whether any of us really do want 'TV Everywhere.'