Who shall set the standards for Mobile TV ?

We've just got back from IBC. It was a busy show, but about the same as last year. (2004, 2005 and 2006 were all busier than the previous year.)

Although still small, the mobile TV and IPTV sections have both doubled in size this year. The IPTV sector has calmed down a bit and vendors are giving more focused descriptions of what they are doing. (A couple of years ago they were all claiming to be "end to end IPTV solution providers".)

On Mobile TV, this year First Partner's showed this very useful industry ecosystem map (downloadable here)



We do quite a bit of work on mobile TV and multimedia for clients, and structured data like this is always useful. Next week I am giving a seminar on Mobile TV at the Mobile Web 2.0 conference, as well as being on a few of the panels - one being on standards. Today I was doing some preparation on standards, and this document came to mind as a way of explaining the problem that Mobile TV - and mobile Web 2.0 - has in general.....and that is a profusion of standards (among others, like cost, of course).

To explain this standards issue for Mobile TV, its useful to go along the value chain from content capture through to the end device:

Content Capture

Standards for content capture in broadband video over IP are fairly well defined - there are different ones (MPEG4, Quicktime, Microsoft etc etc) to be sure, but interoperation is fairly good all considered, and its fairly easy to download a new format.

This is not the case with Mobile TV - there is a proliferation of techniques being pushed for content capture, and people we work with tell us much of the technology is not really "joined up" compared to Web TV. This is exacerbated by every operators' delivery stack being different, so the same phone on 2 different networks have to have different content processing regimes.

In addition, for various supply chain reason Mobile TV is a "short form media" (aka clips) based media. This is problematic in that most TV content is long form media. However any investment in "made for mobile content" is hard to justify, as these supply chain frictions make it very costly, especially in the early days when audiences are small. So the only real way of getting content is to take it off mainstream TV, but repurposing existing content into multiple formats is also costly for many of the the same reasons. Issue then is that nearly all video media is aimed at big screens, not the small "fourth screen" of mobile, so the experience is potentially non optimal.

That small screen, and lack of standards, also limits what one can do with advertising and raises the costs.

Content Aggregation

In the overall aggregation process - edit, search and publish - the tools to manipulate and publish mobile media content are considered to be less complete than the Web TV world, increasing the friction in this area as well.

One of the key tasks of any video service is the search capability so people can find the content - the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) function in the TV world. Again, the area is not in itself a barrier, but allied with the limited form factor of the device it raises barriers at a critical point in the process.

Content Distribution

There are a number of approaches competing to distribute Mobile TV - Video Broadcast with a backpath, Digital Audio Broadcast based, and a number of point to point cell based approaches. In addition, within the main approaches there are competing technologies - DVB-H amd MediaFlo within video broadcasting, for example.

On the point to point services, overall coverage and handoff between cells is far from perfect, so keeping a constant stream going is non-trivial. Buffering is one answer, but that adds more gear (and power demand) to a crowded handset....

Handset

The mobile TV handset is not just a 'phone, from a digital TV point of view it is also the set top box and screen. This is a lot of functionality for a small device, and there are players coming at the end design from a number of approaches - from the phone manufacturers, from the PDA/small PC, and from consumer electronics - and then there is Apple (iPhone, iPod). (And the more one puts on board, the more battery life - and weight - is required)

We've noted already that different operators run varying end to end stacks, and in fact the same phone is often differently configured on different networks. There are also multiple operating systems on 'phones, and in addition, no two phone types are exactly alike so content is often (usually?) not output in the same way on different phones in the same operator's stack.

And the "So What" is....

This lack of standards across the value chain impacts the size of the pull-through economics, in that though there may be 2x as many mobile users across the world vs the PC, there is actually a Tower of Babel when it comes to languages they talk - so any one end-to-end mobile TV market (Content standards + Operator stack + Phone) is actually quite small, so the economics of mobile TV production are fairly poor for any one niche at present.

If one is looking at parallels, the mid 1980's for the PC / Networking industry suggests itself - multiple PC designs, multiple operating systems, multiple LAN and WAN technologies, multiple standards at each point of the supply chain.

What actually drove the PC / Internet as we understand it today was standards - but these were in effect driven by funding by some big players, creating de facto - not de jure - standards. DARPA's net won, IBM's PC won, and Microsoft forced a common operating system - and thus an entire ecosystem.

If one looks at Planet Mobile, then Mobile TV works in Japan and Korea - and in both these countries there is a combination of corporate and legislative pressure to drive far more standardised end-to-end ecosystems (and more rational pricing).

And the difference between the days of the voice mobile and the mobile Web 2.0 is that alternatives - Wifi etc - are far more viable today, and the size of the eventual market will tempt many.

So...we know the desired endgame...the question is will how we get there ?

(Update - the iPhone, with its end to end video supply chain and rapid adoption will probably finesse Mobile TV for quite a while)