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.

Reaching Multiple Screen Convergence: Streaming to the PC, Mobile, Television, and Gaming Devices, Panel Discussion

Track A: Technology
16:00-17:00

Moderator:
Martin Sutherland, Director, European Sales, Vantrix
Panel:
Pierre-Yves Le Berre, VP Business Development
AneviaMr James A Neufeld, Product Specialist, never.no
Jim Taylor, Chief Technologist, Sonic Solutions International Digital Media Alliance (IDMA)

The panel discussion touched on topics that relate to multi-channel distribution, or "Three Screen Convergence" how it was called.
There was talk about three sides that are involved in the distribution: Content provider, technology provider and bandwidth provider. Another (perhaps golden) triangle there.

DRM seems to be a big issue for video service implementations nowadays, that is of course especially true for the three-screen case, as missing standardisation makes multi-channel distribution especially expensive. DECE (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem) is an initiative that tries to achieve an ecosystem based on a common DRM standard, compared to the ecosystem around formats like DVD. Read about it this Digital Beat blog entry.

Using different but synchronized representations of the same content for the different target devices is seen as good practice. Concentrating on the strengths of the different devices this can make the devices complementary and stimulate even viewing the content on several devices simultaneously. Secondary devices like mobile are preferred for interaction and community-building around the content shown on the big screen.

The requirement of a convergent software platform that makes it easy to synchronize all the screens was brought up. It was agreed that the technology is actually there as of today, but problems are missing business models, low adaption and especially lack of standardisation (which would reduce cost vastly). So currently the convergence is more on the network level and in the possibility to synchronize the content between the screens on an application level. The next step has to be format standardisation, but it was agreed that as of now a format war coming up is unavoidable, that of course will hinder market growth in the a couple of years to come.

One general problem was brought up by Mr. Le Berre: Telcos are generally having a problem with any of the video or high-bandwidth phenomena in the sense that they see themselves as the losers in the equation, having to build up their bandwidth without making money with that. Interesting in conjunction with the unwillingness to embrace Multicasting. As a Telco employee Mr. Le Berre wants to see IMS as the next step towards convergence giving the ISPs control over the different content types, so that video, gaming or voice-over-ip traffic can be charged at different(higher) rates than the rest of the data traffic.