The Past, Present And Future of Mobile TV, Panel Discussion

Track A: Technology
10:30-11:30

Moderator:
Christophe Lenaerts, Founder & CEO, Telemak
Panel:
Cedric Gegout, CTO, Streamezzo
Guillaume Gerard, Senior Director, Helix EMEA, RealNetworks
Mr. Otto Schmidbauer, Director Video Solutions EMEA, Dialogic Corporation

It was agreed by the panel that the emergence of phones with big screens and higher usability has perhaps only opened the possibility to make Mobile TV finally profitable. The unlimited-data-plan-owning smart phone crowd is seen as a rather purchase-happy people that is easier to monetize than any mobile target audience so far.

The consumption time and length of consumed video has increased in parallel with the increase of the usability on smart phones. And the currently popular native rich media clients pre-installed or as apps on the phone are seen as a higher stimulant for usage than web-based services, as the former offers unified user experience and re-accessibility.

Technically, Rate adaptation is especially important and beneficial for mobile TV. And the hype towards that technology will surely benefit mobile video the most. The two standard delivery methods to mobile as of today are RTSP and HTTP. HTTP delivery is obviously the buzz at the moment, with major players endorsing the technology, like Apple supporting only HTTP delivery on the ever popular iPhone. Also firewalls and modems don't block the traffic as it often happens with RTSP.
HTTP has its own disadvantages of course, it does e.g. not perform as well for high-scale live distribution. The best-practice strategy seems to be HTTP segmenting, transforming RTSP streams to HTTP "streams" as late and close to the HTTP-only user as possible.

The problem of unsatisfied network operators has been a centric topic here as well. The rise of HTTP has taken the operators out of the equation, the video traffic is not distinguishable. Hence the strong push to the SIP-based IMS from the Telcos' side. Seeming mainly an instrument for operators to regain control over the data traffic, I asked about the benefits for users, service- and content-providers. The reply was that unification of billing and the possibility of data-service roaming would offer value to those parties. We'll see. I am concerned for example how that would effect non-commercial content like user generated content under creative commons license. Could IMS bring back the notion of restriction from of the old CompuServe-days? Anyways, IMS seems not to be undisputed and its emergence is essentially seen only as a long-term solution even by its proponents.

Looking at the mid-term, DVB-H seems to be a bit abandoned today. Alternatively there are other IP-based initiatives like MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast / Multicast Services) pushed by e.g. Sony Ericsson that try to implement multicast and broadcast across mobile networks to reduce bandwidth and cost to solve the bandwidth-problem in the short run. But we have not seen wide adoption of the technology in the last years. The most important thing to get to a solution is probably that the Telcos get their business sorted out.