While big-screen video is big, small-screen video is still very small. The PC-based Internet video revolution is in full swing and there are many video aggregator and enablers out there for user-generated and professional content that is ad-financed or, sometimes, sold by views or downloads.
At the same time, the mobile video revolution is still in its infancy. The reasons for mobile video lagging behind are well known: mobile data traffic is very expensive and most handsets do not yet have big enough screens, fast enough CPUs or cool video players installed.
In the bigscreen Internet world, Brightcove is one of the leading Internet video companies following both a B2C and B2B business model. Here’s a very good video by Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove’s CEO, about video revenue models at the conference Video on the Net.
I personally think that the future of PC-based IP TV will be Flash-based as it delivers good to very good quality and enjoys incredibly big market penetration. On mobile devices, however, Flash Lite 2.0 is promising but lacks penetration in Europe and the US as MNOs do not specifiy it to be embedded on handsets. Japan, of course, is the leading mobile Flash market with a penetration of over 75%, although in most cases it is rather Flash Lite 1.0 or 1.1. which does not yet support video.
So mobile video works by downloading a 3gp video to my new N95 and play it with the embedded Real player. Or I can use one of the mobile Java players which are used for example by social video startup Kyte. Yesterday, I tested Kyte for the first time with my N95, shot a video, uploaded and watched it. It turned out that Kyte’s mobile video quality is still very bad, too bad to attract a large user base up- and downloading self-made videos.
Still, with enough fantasy it is easy to imagine a mobile video future where millions of people with data flat rates consume video and hundreds of thousands upload it in high quality. The more you believe in on-demand media consumption, the less you believe in Mobile TV broadcasting.
Mobile TV broadcasting is necessary for live events and content distribution in real-time for the mass market, but the long tail of video will be driven by on-demand usage. Therefore, I recommend the new Mobile TV broadcasting players in the market to complement their service with a user-generated cross-device Internet video platform that might help to find content that can be broadcasted in the future.
