NAB 2006 brought to the fore one of the great paradoxes of the TV industry during these years: while half of the exhibitors concentrate on offering resources to produce hd material, the other half is dedicated to promoting different ways of bringing this material to the tiny screens of phones and mobile devices.
As always, when it comes to a nascent technology, solutions already exist but there are few buyers. The manufacturers promote with great fanfare the resounding success of the "visionaries" who began to think about these issues a couple of years ago... but mere mortals are faced with a tangle of incompatible standards and a confusing offer of video repurposing systems that can range from a US$600 Mac Mini to sophisticated headers that require millions in investments.
Why is it important to attack the mobile TV market? Because it has the potential to become a very interesting source of income. Mobile phone users are becoming a very broad market for video-on-demand applications, as almost everyone is willing to pay a dollar or two for video pieces with a practical limit of three minutes in length and with the quality that can be expected from streams that they usually do not use. a bandwidth greater than 192Kbps.
Many new screens
While in our countries users fill the limited memory of their mobile phones with the clips they buy or get "out there", the industry is looking for other fronts to promote the development of mobile TV.
Europe already has a variant of DVB that allows you to implement mobile applications; QualComm and the main Asian phone manufacturers promote the Media-FLO system in the United States and – perhaps a little late – the possibility of viable systems to implement mobile applications appearing in the ATSC universe is beginning to be glimpsed. And while we all thought about mobile TV from the perspective of phones or pocket TVs, the world of PodCasts took the entertainment industry by storm in less than two years.
As always, it is risky to make predictions. But in this case I think we can assure without fear of being wrong that the mobile TV business is going to take on a very different character in the coming years: the receivers are not going to be only mobile phones. As things stand, adding a tuner to an iPod or handheld is a 30- or 40-gram weight problem, the consumer electronics industry could be enabled in a matter of months to produce pocket TVs on a large scale, and it's perfectly possible that car video systems will also operate as receivers. TV.
Another possible future for the mobile TV business is the ability to replicate the content of a PVR on a portable device -- something like "carry TiVo in your pocket." After all, if we synchronize a handheld with pc content, why not think about taking our favorite shows everywhere? This model seems especially viable in a world in which personal computers tend to become entertainment centers, with the potential to function as stewards of the television offering. Side note: Extracting encrypted content from commercial PVRs is one of the favorite activities of the hacker community these days... then the demand exists.
TV or not TV
All of the above brings us to a very important point: becoming content providers for mobile phones is only part of the matter. After all, the cell phone business has a very serious problem: you will always have to have the same partners, the owners of the network. And this limitation means that in many parts of the world content owners give up on this market simply because the virtual obligation to share profits with telephone operators makes the business unattractive.
However, many companies, even small companies that do not come from the world of conventional TV, are managing to create business models that ensure reasonable profitability by attacking the market for thematic content: "cold" material, low cost and limited attractiveness. And for better or worse, don't forget that these "cold" content providers are often very friendly to "hot" businesses, as they also run the burgeoning "adult" content business. These operations have achieved some penetration in our region by distributing content via the web or achieving favorable agreements with telephone operators that also need to add services to their network to become competitive.
But in general the real business of TV-by-phone is going slowly. Major sporting events, news and contests do not reach our phones within time frames that allow them to be classified as television because the summary of the event that arrives four hours late is not perceived as television, it is perceived as a document. And this brings us to one of the most important factors for the development of mobile TV: If we want to offer services that users accept as TV we must aim to preserve one of the most important values of open TV: immediacy.
Content vs. platforms
One of the most frequent vices of TV operators in our region, especially in small markets, is the tendency to underestimate technical problems. In recent months I have met three or four major TV producers who faced with the opportunity to get involved in the mobile TV content generation business decide to invest the monumental sum of US $ 30 to acquire a QuickTime Pro license and dedicate themselves to creating 3GPP video clips -- only to discover that the subject of coding the material is the least important.
The topic is repurposing, the art or science of repackaging content to sell it in another market. The business opportunity for content producers is supposed to be that they are already producing the material. And that material loses validity over time, then it is very important to implement platforms that allow to ensure extraordinarily short response times. And in addition to processing the material to deliver it in the right format and in a reasonable time it is essential to make sure that we put the material in the hands of the network operators in a minimum time.
Where does all this take us? Essentially, in addition to setting up a mobile content production operation, we have to solve a series of problems in the world of information technology. If our information transport system is not efficient, our material "cools" and loses value.
How to repackage?
Producers who think they can take the news of the day, put it on a CD-R disc and send it the next morning to the mobile operator, don't have much of a future in the mobile TV business. For a repurposing operation to be successful, it is essential to think about setting up a mobile content production operation simultaneous to the existing one -- with the aggravating factor that the coding of large volumes of material for distribution on 3G networks can become a monumental bottleneck.
The mobile content producer faces several major technical issues. For starters, the vast majority of mobile phones available don't handle video in a 4:3 ratio -- or 16:9. The small screens of mobile phones are not very friendly to the general blueprints -- and neither are telephone networks. In the real world it is very common for the bandwidth of the material to reach levels below 96Kbps, definitely insufficient to appreciate the subtleties of a football stadium panorama, for example.
All of the above leads us to a very important conclusion: mobile content requires special processing for its use. Taking the material "from the air" and simply changing it in medium is not going to serve to produce attractive content.
The type of processing that is required for mobile content applications can be done on many non-linear editing platforms. It is about republishing the material considering the restrictions of the platform. It will often be necessary to reframe images, apply 2D effects to turn a camera movement into a static plane, or manipulate the audio to make it intelligible when transmitted using ridiculously low bandwidth.
An interesting proposal
At NAB 2006 Snell & Wilcox presented a platform for the production of mobile content that has a good chance of becoming an industry standard. Helios is an extraordinarily robust production system that includes the necessary tools to post-produce mobile content and put it "on the network" with really low processing times and excellent quality results, as far as possible.
The basic premise of Helios is that the material must be processed in order to obtain the best possible quality with the bandwidth available. And to achieve this, Snell & Wilcox decided to bring to the world of software one of its main assets: more than 20 years of experience in digital signal processing, conversions and material transcoding. Helios allows you to scale material, correct color, repair defects, reduce noise, reframe and apply effects to reduce detail – and thus improve bandwidth usage.
A typical example of Helios' possibilities could come from editing a football match. Using the tools included with Helios it is possible to process an open plane of a player, track the ball and turn it into an image of excellent quality for the screen of a mobile device. An experienced operator can process a shot of this style in a matter of seconds: It all comes down to defining an area of interest, establishing whether you want to reduce the detail of the background and whether it is necessary to make adjustments to the composite sequence that Helios proposes almost in real time. Once the process is finished, the resulting file is simply sent to the distributor via a conventional network connection.
Is this too complex a platform to process 120x90 pixel video clips? Apparently yes, but it is suitable for processing large amounts of material and can easily adapt to the needs of any type of portable device. It's as flexible as the market, and that's what's needed.
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The Return of Pocket TV |
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How to solve the problem of bringing content from the TV industry to the millions of mobile phones that enter the market every year? The BBC, Nokia and Endemol are working on a different model. Instead of approaching the issue from the perspective of transporting video clips through the 3G networks of telephone operators, they are betting on the idea of turning mobile phones into digital terrestrial TV receivers. Endemol has extensive experience in the business of selling content to mobile operators. In fact, in the last four years it has made it a viable business to sell content from its reality shows as events that can be billed minute by minute. And Nokia needs to continue taking advantage of the seemingly inexhaustible flow of users who always want to renew their phone devices. The result of this alliance will materialize in Great Britain before the end of 2007 with the launch of two or three commercial operations that will support the use of mobile digital TVs – most of which will also serve as telephones. It does not seem to be very important news... Using DVB-H (H for Handheld) channels to stream television is not a great novelty, and the problems of small screens and the latent sound of cell phones will still be there. But there is an essential difference: A phone-TV will make it possible for users to access television content without using the cell phone network. We're talking about digital TV streams , not streaming video over networks with very limited bandwidth. Skeptics might say that this subtlety is not very important, it is simply about bringing to the pockets of consumers the same restrictions that have accompanied us all our lives: The user of mobile TV would become, as always, a slave to the programming of the channels. The question is whether this really is "bad." Many players in the industry do not seem to care about these limitations and in fact, both Nokia and the main European free-to-air TV operators are willing to bet on this scheme, and before the end of the year pilot operations will be mounted in Spain, Finland, France, Sweden and the United Kingdom. As a reference we can say that in the Great Britain BBC and Channel 4 have been participating in tests that take their terrestrial transmissions to Nokia 7710 phones and what these tests are demonstrating is that users can find a way to incorporate pocket TV into their daily routine. Apparently they prefer free TV to paid clips, even if you have commercials. The DVB-H standard is much more robust than the ATSC standard when it comes to implementing mobile applications, although it has its own repertoire of peculiarities that make the user experience not identical to that of the "stationary" viewer. Perhaps the most important are that most operations will be limited to 16 channels and that channel changes can require up to four seconds before obtaining a stable signal, something very unattractive for lovers of zapping. By the time this copy of TV and Video is circulating Nokia will have already put on the market its first phone enabled as a DVB-H transmission receiver, the N92. |
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