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May 6, 2007
Share and Share unlike: Mobile twitter, Mobile video, Mobile TV, user generated content and DVB-H
I get many of my ideas for blogs by relating unconnected events together
In this case, they are
a) Today Rudy De Waele invited me to join twitter
b) I was reading an article about called User-Generated DVB-H Broadcasts on moconews
c) Last week, when I spoke at Cambridge wireless network and I spoke about the pitfalls of sharing mobile content
Lets start with the last one ..
In my talk at Cambridge wireless network, I said that: The mobile data industry adopts a double standard. Yes, we understand user generated content - yes we want people to share user generated content (because that’s viral marketing you see!) .. But the irony is .. No .. We still want to 'control' how that content is shared ..
Specifically, we don’t want it to end up on the 'Web' (as in inside 'flickr') because then we lose in the vast pool of the Web and it loses its unique element of mobility! (That customers like content accessible on the Web is another matter!). Thus, therein lies the irony of 'share and share unlike' (the opposite of share and share alike i.e. on one hand we want people to share mobile content but on the other hand, we want them to share it 'our way'
So, now ..
the contra question is .. How can we get users to share mobile content and yet provide something useful to the users? i.e. when would people want to share content and yet keep it mobile only?
The answer to that is : A Mobile broadcast version of 'twitter'
If you know how twitter works, then its a simple step to be able to broadcast user generated content - perhaps into a FOAF situation as well(i.e. friend of a friend situation)
Is there value in this? Yes! because the whole idea of twitter is 'instant updates'
So, instant 'rich media' updates aka sharing user generated content primarily captured on mobile phones - is indeed valuable and .. because the mobile device is available at the point of inspiration - there is a natural synergy
If you accept that, and read my book if you don’t (Mobile Web 2.0 by Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish) then we come to the final piece of the puzzle ..
But .. How to do this?
The answer lies in the link User-Generated DVB-H Broadcasts
While this is not possible now ..
The operative phrase in the above article is:
To be clear, it’s not using DVB-H technology to get the video from the handset to the servers, but from the servers to all the viewers.
In other words, you can capture content and upload it via 3G but then you must use mobile broadcast technology(like DVB-H in Europe, DMB in Korea etc), to send this content to a number of 'friends' and indeed 'friends of friends' - (you cannot use cellular technology for broadcast - it simply wont scale!)
This could be a real killer app for Mobile video and an important reason to make mobile video technology seamless.
I have always believed that we, in the UK, need to speed up on Mobile video deployment since it has such great communication potential. But the unfortunate thing is, too many people see it only as 'watching soaps on phones' - which is only a shadow if it's true potential.
thoughts?
Posted by ajit at May 6, 2007 10:48 PM
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Comments
MO, From consumer’s point of view: Mobile TV, basically I think users would expect a trial period, a free Beta period, once they started to use, users give much attention to picture quality/connection speed, screen size. I also don’t like to waste my battery life for not an essential service.
I guess adoption strategy of text and video have major difference in mobile, I do view/share text content, since its cheap, I do see/share videos(short live streams) with close circle, not all the links in FOAF, Secondly quality(rating) of content matters a lot. I don’t know where Ads go here…People do hate Ads in mobile, may be Free/cheap video service can go with Ads. Sometimes P2P, content forwarding etc go hand and hand with mobile tv.
- Saran
Posted by: saran at May 7, 2007 7:38 PM
Well.... Hate to be a Messerschmidt but: Your point that broadcasting updates to friends ("Twitter style") using 3G "unicast" doesn't scale and that you should use DVB-H broadcasting instead sounds like a given, but it is actually wrong. If you have maybe 10-100 friends (who should receive your latest update) it is still incredibly much more efficient to send 10-100 copies of that update (text, picture or video) to each friend than to reserve a broadcast frequency for an entire city or even the entire country, just to reach the same 10-100 people. What you fail to realize in your argument is that what twitter is doing is not broadcasting (i.e. sending the same content to almost ALL PEOPLE in an area, like a TV channel), it is multicasting (sending the same info to SOME people in an area). And unless the number is absolutely huge, it is much more efficient to simulate this multicast with several unicasts, than to simulate it with a broadcast, especially if your friends are not physically situated close to each other so the broadcast can be very local. Sorry for raining on your parade, it's compulsive ;-)
Posted by: MrBesserwisser at May 9, 2007 2:01 AM