Easy, lightweight and effective: videos are almost ready to wear. Finally we will explore all the capabilities of the devices we already carry in our pockets.
Most of us probably don’t use a mobile video service yet, but we will start using those services during the new year, thanks to the quick and easy sharing features that allow you to share directly your emotions, without having them locked in your pockets.
In the U.S. 6.5 millions people viewed videos from their mobile devices, in August 2008. That makes a tiny percentage of all users, but growing rapidly. In Europe the smartphones markets is more developed, and the invasion of the new devices is just about to start.
Why should you watch videos on your mobile device? Let’s remember what happened between TV and radio stations (…video killed the radio star), or the quick invasion of online videos and Youtube changing a web that was entirely based on text. The effectiveness and the magic engagement recipe of videos have a unique potential. The availability of contents that fit to everyone, from tv-series on iTunes to user generated videos will do the rest.
All the main barriers are going down. Thanks to new pricing models (i.e. prepaid cards and hourly tariffs) mobile broadband is becoming cheaper and cheaper by the day.
Additionally we almost have only three mobile platforms on the market (Symbian, iPhone and the upcoming Android) and this led to better interfaces (the keyboard, the touch screen and so on…), that led to a better user experience. For application developers it’s way easier to develop for only three platforms than for a thousand heterogeneous systems.
All this helps customers start using applications that are more engaging and have a lot more features, even on mobile devices. It all started with the advent of the iPhone (i.e. a device that merged a mobile multimedia player with a cell phone) and the other terminals that are arriving on the markets.
For the first time in history we have a device (made up by the cell phone and the broadband mobile network) that allows us to create, consume and share contents easily. It remins me of what happened to the Web with the diffusion of blogging platforms: content creation will explode and we will face two trends (that reflect consumers’ interests): high quality professional contents (available in iTunes and other marketplaces) and User Generated Videos.
This is the english version of a post that has been published here, in Italian.
