Mobile Video Might Make Carriers, Providers Clash
21.05.12
As mobile video finally starts to take off, making money from it remains a challenge, and content providers and carriers may clash over economics before they find a way to share the costs and benefits.
Mobile video initiatives led by carriers, network builders and local broadcasters in the past few years have stumbled or been slow to take off. In the U.S., Qualcomm shut down its dedicated FLO TV network earlier this year, and the commercial launch of Dyle Mobile TV, a national service offering local digital TV to phones and other devices, has been pushed back from late this year to early 2012. But as an extension of Web-based programming, mobile video is beginning to explode, executives of media companies said earlier this month at the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco .
Consumers play YouTube videos 400 million times a day on mobile devices, said Francisco Varela, YouTube's global head of platform. The flow goes the other way, too: YouTube's customers upload as much as two hours of their own video content every minute. Executives from ABC, CBS, Hulu and the BBC also said the mobile Internet looks poised to change their businesses. About 20 percent of people in Britain watch BBCi, an online service of the national broadcasting agency, and tablets are among the hottest platforms for it, said Daniel Danker, BBCi's general manager of Programmes and On-Demand. He hopes to see 80 percent watching BBCi in five years.
Source: PCWorld