What’s Next for Mobile TV – Part I

And as more of the world’s population becomes smartphone equipped, and the networks that serve them become video friendly, it’s a good time to briefly look back at what has and hasn’t worked so far and how mobile TV is going to develop in the future.

This is quite a broad subject, so for the sake of brevity this blog will be split into three parts, each with a different perspective on mobile TV. This first one looks at the evolution of Mobile TV from its early incarnations to the current day. The second will look at Content & Experience – should we recognise the different capabilities and characteristics of a mobile device (in contrast to a shared static device such as a regular TV) and alter either the viewing experience or even the content itself to match the medium? The final blog will look at the underlying technology involved (again both the recent history and forward trajectory).

A Brief History of Mobile TV

The early “mobile TVs” were just that, small handheld gadgets from companies like Casio and Sony that offered one thing – TV. They let you tune-in to your local TV signal and watch the same content at the same time as a proper television. The sense of wonder that these miniature TVs that you could take everywhere engendered, was tempered by the fact that the tiny screens often had woeful picture quality and they struggled to hold a good signal. No matter, they hinted at a consumer appetite for content on the go. The content was exactly the same, driven by the same linear schedule that served your home TV, and the experience was, well, hit and miss. The device was single purpose.

During the middle of the last decade a new approach was tried. The growth of mobile phones, and later smartphones, suggested that a single multi-purpose device combining telephony, data and television would have greater mass market potential. The challenge was that the TV features would be built and delivered around a new dedicated broadcast network with separate radio spectrum and a seriously expensive implementation cost that stretched any business model. Qualcomm’s MediaFLO was a good example of this model and it closed down in 2011. MediaFLO also offered mobile-specific content, testing the concept that the nature of the medium required a different approach to content. Arguably the service didn’t reach a scale or lifespan to answer that question properly.

And so we reach today. Our smartphones have become increasingly video friendly, with high resolution screens and hardware decoding, many people have one, and the networks that service them (whether cellular or WiFi based) increasingly able to deliver video at an acceptable quality level. So it is unsurprising then that we already are consuming a lot of video on these devices. In fact by the end of 2013, more than half of all mobile (cellular) traffic was already video.

During the first half of 2014, an average of 18% of all BBC iPlayer TV viewing was on a mobile device (that excludes tablets which account for an additional 27% – 30%). All of the delivery constraints associated with mobile video and TV are gone or disappearing fast, which brings us back to the original question – should the content and the methods of discovery, such as a linear channel schedule, remain the same as for regular TV or should they change to better suit the medium? Of course TV itself is also changing, with the steady rise of on-demand viewing growing year on year and quarter on quarter. Netflix traffic now accounts for one third of all US internet traffic at peak times.

The next blog in this series will examine the differences between a connected mobile device and a more traditional TV and explores what could or should be done to align the viewer, the content and how they both interact.

Steve Plunkett, Chief Technology Officer.