• by Mike Bloxham , Op-Ed Contributor, January 10, 2007

While the consensus seems to be that 2006 was the year of online video, we are still a long way from really understanding the impact on the TV business of the rapid and huge growth in the amount of video available online and the amount of time spent viewing it.

There are many questions as yet unanswered. How is media consumption being affected among different groups? Are there dayparts when more video is consumed online than in others? Where is it being viewed? What are the optimum advertising formats for the online video environment? Does online video complement or detract from time spent with conventional TV? And so on.

While some research is finding its way into the public domain and is starting to shape our thinking on these issues and others, more remains proprietary and it will be some time before we can seriously feel we have defined the modus operandi of online video.

Meanwhile, the world of technology and consumer electronics pushes us forward in other areas, demanding that we learn about yet more new platforms and capabilities--while still playing catch-up on those that we've barely taken out of the box and found a budget for.

This fact of a life led in a time of ever-accelerating media change is rammed home with a vengeance to any of us attending this week's annual geekfest in Las Vegas, more formally known as the Consumer Electronics Show, where around 140,000 Grade-A geeks and technophiles gather to mainline on the most bloody of bleeding edge technologies and devices as they line up for commercial launch over the next 24 months.

There are usually a handful of themes that grab the attention at each show; this year, one big focus is mobile video. Although it's definitely not the first time mobile video has been in the limelight here--and it's obviously been a part of the media landscape for a while now--while walking the floors here, listening to the buzz and trawling through the various announcements, one can see that mobile video is iclearly gaining momentum.

The number of portable video devices here is quite astounding. For every one you've heard of --like Microsoft's Zune--there have got to be 40-50 others blinking at you from booth after booth.

Almost all of these, though, follow the model of device-as-storage-and-playback with relatively limited capabilities for other approaches or for communication (Zune allows for wireless sharing of content within certain playback parameters, but most do not). Probably the most notable exception to this trend came in the announcement from Verizon of its tie-up with Qualcomm's MediaFlo to enable live TV-to mobile broadcasting. Unlike V-Cast, it's not an on-demand service--and when it launches around the end of the first quarter, it will have the likes of CBS, NBCU, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV and Fox News providing content. It really is like what we've always though of as "real TV" on the cell phone.

The ingenuity of this comes from using not the cellular network for distribution, but good old UHF signals and TV masts up and down the country. It does away with latency as you change channels and makes for a more classically televisual experience for the viewer--albeit on the smaller screen.

Naturally, as with any platform, until the use base grows we won't be able to determine its true potential, but if Verizon (and other service providers who can be assumed to follow suit --the MediaFlo deal with Verizon is not an exclusive one) is successful in its marketing, mobile video may just accelerate its development over the next 12-24 months. Maybe even to the extent that we'll be saying 2007 finally saw things move beyond the hype and become the year of mobile video.

If so, we'll all need to be asking the same questions of mobile video, that we've been asking of online video.

And the point Mitch Oscar raised in his post on yesterday's TV Board with regard to television and online video is equally relevant for mobile platforms. Some may want to call mobile video one thing--while others feel it should be called something else. In the end, it's all programming and entertainment or news or sport or whatever to the consumer. And that's what we need to be led by, if we are to understand how to optimize the potential of all this for all parties