What is Mobile TV? More than TV, beyond just a phone

I've been hanging around television and broadcast folks for the past two weeks - from invited to speak about mobile and TV to the AIB Awards ceremony (AIB is the Association of International Broadcasters) in London last week to delivering the keynote to the Asian Television Forum in Singapore this past week, also about mobile TV.

There is a lot of interest and curiosity about the potential of TV and video content delivered via the mobile phone, and the role of mobile telecoms in broadcast (TV) services. Its a young industry (first TV content shown on mobile phones were launched in Finland as news clip downloads in 2001; and simultaneously MTV in the UK launched the first interactive TV show where viewers could vote by SMS texting) and most concepts tend to be local trials and experiments and pilots. Even the most advanced mobile TV networks and services, such as those currently in South Korea and Japan, are not yet making money on their mass market propositions.

So its still a baby industry, learning to walk before it learns to run. But I think we are getting plenty of good insights into what may become "mobile TV" and how consumers might enjoy that.

First. Lets remember my thesis that mobile is the newest (7th) mass media and is totally different with unique benefits. The mobile can do all that the previous six mass media (print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV and internet) can do. Not all quite as well (watching a movie is not as comfortable as in the cinema or on TV or on a PC screen) but in some cases much better (internet has interactivity but under a billion people worldwide use eMail. On mobile 2 billion people use SMS text messaging and young people all over the world are abandoning eMail in favour of SMS text messaging). If you haven't read Alan Moore's White Paper on 7th Mass Media, I really urge you to do so.

And then lets talk briefly about the CNN news clips on the mobile phone, etc. There are 1.5 billion TV sets in the world; and there are 3.1 billion mobile phones in the world. The total worldwide TV population is growing by about 30-50 million per year. The mobile phone subscription population grew by "only" 400 million this year...  So yes, one part of this mobile-TV convergence is that current existing TV content is repurposed for mobile phones (CNN news clips, Football highlights, music video clips, etc). And equally part of mobile-TV convergence is repurposing existing mobile phone services onto the TV broadcasts, such as American Idol voting, SMS-to-TV chat and 24 hour news shows using user-generated pictures and short video from cameraphones by viewers.

But yes, mobile TV is not "TV on mobile" nor is it "mobile phone (services) on TV". It is a new service, content and programming format opportunity. And by this, the example I used a lot the past two weeks in numerous talks with TV broadcast executives, is the shift from cinema to TV. In the 1930s and 1940s, people would go to the cinema to see long form films (what we'd call Hollywood movies today), and documentaries, and "newsreels" (short news reports from around the world) and "cliffhanger" serials - shorter films run in a long series, where the hero would solve some big problems this week, to get into even bigger trouble towards the end, and face that cliff-hanger, until next week's episode when we'd get to see how our hero managed to get out of trouble (but that episode would end with another cliff-hanger) etc. And for children we had the animation movies from Disney, Looney Tunes etc.

We recognize that documentaries shifted to TV where we have countless documentary channels from the Discovery Channels and History Channels to the BBC factual channels etc. Still occasionally a big blockbuster documentary is shot on film for cinema, like those by Al Gore and Michael Moore for example. The newsreel has totally left the cinema (was cannibalized by nightly TV news in the 1950s) and the cliffhanger movie is a rare exception. Even with most movie series (Bond, Spiderman, Die Hard) the hero solves the problem within the movie rather than leaving the audience to wait for the sequel to finish the story. Rare movie series are designed to feature cliff-hangers but some do still exist (Star Wars, Kill Bill). And again while there are several mostly children-oriented animated movies every year, by far the large majority of childrens animated content is produced for TV.

The point is, that every single movie ever produced for the cinema has been re-purposed for TV, either for broadcast TV or in some cases of extreme violence or adult content etc, then to cable, video cassette or DVD. So of the existing cinema (3rd mass media) formats, all have been repurposed to TV (5th mass media). But these formats do not "sustain" television today. We have a huge appetite for more content, television offers vastly more viewing for mass audiences than cinema. And TV is commercially feasible to deliver such content. Some concepts were adopted from other media (soap operas, sports broadcasts were cannibalized from radio for example)

Consider the innovations that power television today. Talk shows. A daytime staple with the Oprahs and nightly staple with the Lettermans and Lenos. Game shows, from afternoon game shows to big audience prime time shows such as Millionaire and Weakest Link. Music video, the innovation by MTV 25 years ago. Reality TV from Big Brother to American Idol. These television content formats are not sustainable in the cinema !  You cannot charge people 50 cents, rush them into the cinema seats, to show them one music video by Madonna of 3 minutes, then hussle them all out of the theatre as the next audience is about to come in to watch the next 3 minute video by 50 cent, etc. Same for Big Brother. It works on TV, we would not walk into the cinema several times per day when the House is running, to snack at bits of what is happening in the reality show.

So here is my point. ALL existing cinema content that had been invented by the 1950s when TV appeared commerically, also was shown on TV. In some cases TV absorbed (and often improved) that concept; in other cases cinema was very resilient in retaining a given content format (the Hollywood blockbuster movie for example). But MOST hit programming on TV was invented for TV. Even though we have "moving pictures" with colour and sound on cinema, and nothing stops us from showing a music video or American Idol episode in the cinema, that media is not economically viable for those formats.

Yes, this is another long posting, sorry about that. I'm a bit tired here at the airport waiting to get home, but wanted to get this blog entry done.

So then. Lets take our lesson. Since TV as an industry is massively bigger than cinema, and regularly every bit of cinema content will also be used as part of the content for TV, but most of TV content was invented for that mass media channel, then this is very likely going to also happen on "mobile TV".

So yes, its very likely that ALL existing television content will be repurposed for mobile phone consumption. But new innovation is now required to invent those parallels of what talk shows, game shows, music videos and reality TV became to be in terms of viewerships and revenues for television.

Where do we go? Well, one interesting twist is that fave story of mine, Pop Kids, by Ex Machina in the Netherlands. Merging American Idol style pop singer contest reality TV, with online multiplayer virtual reality worlds of broadband internet (like Second Life and Habbo Hotel) with the user-generated power inherent in the mobile phone. So pairs of "parents" generate their avatar, the Pop Kid, which is built out of the "DNA" of the phones of their parents (what is on my music playlist, converging with that of the other phone etc). Then just like with the tamagotchi, the "parents" have to nurture and train the Pop Kid to grow and eventually enter into a contest against other avatar-based virtual pop idol kids.

At the Asian Television Forum we heard many ideas of where this mobile TV idea might evolve. One of the exciting ideas we heard from a few of the panelists talking about Japan and Spain, was the idea of audience participation in the plot development of a series, as we've also reported here at this blogsite before. Another is the convergence of multiplayer online gaming with television like Kart Rider in South Korea. And yet another is the migration of the CNN News Ticker style of breaking news channel to the idle screen of the mobile phone. I've talked about this a lot, after it was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo as iMedia two years ago. Since then similar idle screen news scrollers have been introduced around the world from Vodafone in Portugal to M1 in Singapore. This is quite an alarming development for the newsmedia (especially 24 hour news broadcasters) as it might do to 24 hour TV news what the internet is now doing for the daily newspaper in all parts of the industrialized world. The Finnish daily business newspaper, Taloussanomat, is probably the first major national newspaper to quit because of online (and mobile) cannibalization. The last print edition of Taloussanomat will be printed one month from now, on 31st of December 2007.

The phone is both the control point for convergence, and the pervasive (near-ubiquitous) media channel. Yes, the screen is tiny compared to our plasma screen TV, but the phone is with us at all times. And young people do not mind squinting at small screens for long times like the Sony Playstation Portable.

Mobile TV will allow access to the power of customer identity only available on mobile telecoms networks (on fixed landline phones anyone can answer or initiate calls on a given phone, the father, the mother, the son or the daughter, but on mobile phones they are our own; 63% of married adults do not even share their phone with their spouce according to Wired).

Perhaps most importantly, the advertising industry will learn a new way of doing advertising when they develop advertising formats and concepts for mobile TV. On all traditional TV formats (broadcast, cable, satellite etc) if there is advertising, it is currently embedded into the linear consumption of the content. We cut the show for an advertising break, or we force to watch an ad before we show the content etc.

On mobile (and mobile TV) we can remove the artificial linkage between consuming ads and consuming content. Blyk is showing us radical new ways to make advertising appealing to the target audiences, to the point where we can safely remove the linear programming link. So we could have for example a couple of ads to view when we feel like it, and we can watch the movie without a break.

So while yes, probably all current TV concepts will appear in some forms or another, what will have to happen is that we invent now, "better" or at least "different" formats for "mobile TV" - formats which are not even feasible on current broadcast/cable TV. That is what I call mobile TV. And Alan and I will keep our attention very closely to all developments in this area and will bring them to you on this blogsite.

And finally, anyone interested in mobile TV, I've just released my latest Thought Piece about it (a 2 page intense short version of a white paper). If you'd like it, don't leave me a comment asking for it here at the blog, but write directly to me at   tomi  at   tomiahonen  dot  com.  I'll send you the Thought Piece in return, for free of course. Obviously mobile TV is also a chapter in my brand new book, Digital Korea for those very serious about the topic who want to read more about it.