3G-TV convergence - The personal touch
Mobile TV is already being experienced and exploited, making money all around the world. And it’s not by watching news clips and football highlights: it is through participation and personalisation, says Tomi T Ahonen
Former BBC Director General, Greg Dyke says: “The time is coming when all the traditional broadcast shows will be available on your mobile phone.”
Italian mobile operator Three/Hutchison bought broadcaster Canale 7. Disney is launching itself as an MVNO in the USA. Many are suggesting TV on mobiles could be the big hit, the killer application, that 3G has been hoping for.
Don't be fooled. In my 3G service creation workshops when we have examined the 3G-TV propositions, I have repeatedly been saying for the past three years that: “TV will not be primarily consumed by pocketable 3G mobile phones.” I then always add: “It will be TV-related content and services that will deliver the success of mobile TV.” Obviously I believe in the success of TV-related content on 3G. But why the distinction?
Media experts have categorised the viewing categories of multimedia content into four general formats by their order of introduction. A hundred years ago came the first screen cinema, which offered movies, news and advertising. Cinema was an audience experience, not a private one. It was also a “pay per view” type of experience.
In the 1950s the second screen, TV became a mass market product, and it totally cannibalised the news offering from cinema, as well as cannibalising formats from other media, such as the soap operas and live sports coverage from radio. TV viewing was private or close family. TV introduced many new formats like games shows, talk shows, videogaming, music video and reality TV.
The third screen is the PC screen. That allowed us, for the first time, to create our own content, such as the increasingly more audio-visual PowerPoint presentations, our digital picture libraries, music playlists and so forth. Through the Internet, the third screen gave us access to web content, including new services such as chat and search, and cannibalising existing media formats, such as napsterizing music content and various webcasts and streamed content.
Now the mobile phone is our fourth screen. Like the PC, the mobile phone is interactive. But unlike cinema, TV and the PC, the mobile phone screen is so small, it is almost exclusively a private screen. Also, our interaction with the fourth screen is very different from the previous three. We consume content on the other three screens in blocks of time that are half an hour or more. But on the fourth screen we often have only half a minute or so of time. Fourth screen consumption is much more like “snacking” – taking in little bits at a time.
Lapland TV via 3G
So if not video clips and small-screen re-broadcasts, what will be successful on the fourth screen? We do have the tool of the Six M's (originally Five M's) as outlined in my book on how to make money with any mobile service, m-Profits. Let's use the Six M's as the outline to review some of the main successful innovations in mobile TV.
The first of the Six M's is Movement, escaping the fixed place. Few broadcasters are expecting to launch “Location-Based Variations” to television content, so it might seem as if there could not be much on Movement. That is not what they decided in Norway, however. Up North in Lapland live the indigenous population of the Saame, who wander across the borders of Norway, Sweden and Finland, herding reindeer and making a nomadic living. The area of Lapland is vast and extremely sparsely populated. What is worse, the Saame people do not stay put, they roam around the region.
They do have needs to consume television content, like the rest of us. Their language is different to that of the Norwegians, and much of their culture and interests are quite different from mainstream Norway. If would be prohibitively expensive to set up television broadcasts to the whole of Lapland, just to meet the needs of the Saame population that amounts to a few tens of thousands of Saame in Norway.
Here is where 3G can help. Norway has been deploying its cellular coverage very deep into Lapland. Now they have launched TV programming exclusive to the Saame population, available via mobile phones. There is no need to install a separate broadcast network. And the Saame population can get their “regional” programming actually anywhere in Norway.
Spycams and TV voting
The second of the Six M's is Moment, expanding the concept of time. One of the most powerful elements of the mobile phone and the Moment attribute is multitasking, doing more than one thing at the same time. MTV innovated with the “spy cam” idea. While broadcasting the Video Music Awards for Europe, MTV also offered premium 3G viewers a backstage pass to the same show. The idea is that while viewers sit at home watching the main show on the TV screen, they use their 3G phone to view other content of the same show, such as a VIP backstage pass.
The third attribute is Me, expressing oneself. The best-known example of the Me attribute in mobile TV concepts is TV voting. Before the reality shows of Big Brother and Pop Idol, etc, the first TV show with viewer voting was the revolutionary Videoclash on MTV in 2001, the first TV programme where the viewers could select what to see next, in real time, by sending text messages to the show. Now in Spain the concept has been developed even further by the Dutch TV producer Endemol, which released a serial cartoon where viewers could vote on what would happen in upcoming episodes.
SMS to TV Rap
The fourth M is Multi-user, or extending into the community. A good example of a Multi-user mobile TV service is viewer participation in the form of SMS-to-TV chat. Launched in Finland in 2001, over the years it has evolved to SMS-to-TV dating as in Italy, SMS-to-TV games as in Malaysia and SMS-to-TV Rap the latest hit in Finland. But the most advanced concept of premium user-generated content on the mobile phone, broadcast live on TV, comes from Korea, on the Tu Media network. Last Autumn Tu Media introduced videoclip-to-TV chat. Any viewer could send their videoclips as premium-cost MMS messages to the broadcaster, and moments later these would be broadcast live. Your kid having a birthday? Shoot the video and turn on the TV.
The fifth of the Six M's is Money, expending financial resources. A good example of a mobile TV service generating money is TV voting used in hit reality and gaming shows from the Big Brother House in the UK, to American Idol, to Who Wants to be a Millionaire in India. Premium SMS text messaging revenues are rapidly becoming a significant source for whole networks. Endemol says its Big Brother formats deliver 25 per cent of revenues from mobile phones in Europe, while Asian broadcaster Star says that, already out of its total earnings, over five per cent in many of its markets come from SMS revenues.
From TiVo to Network PVR
The last of the Six M's is Machines – empowering automation and gadgets. I have often said that the mobile phone is the perfect remote control for any device that is beyond line of sight, like controlling and monitoring our home, our office, our car, etc. Now some broadcasters are introducing what they call “Network PVR's” (Personal Video Recorders) as we have seen in Italy, and also offered, for example, by Korean mobile TV innovator OnTimeTek. With a network PVR, you don't need to buy a hard disk video recorder like a TiVo box or Sky+. You can pause and rewind live TV, skip past ads, and do just about any kind of recording and repeat viewing of content.
What makes Network PVR so unique is that you are not limited to viewing the TV content at home, if you have to pause a TV show, you can continue watching it at the office, at a friend's house, and obviously also on a 3G phone if you want. But here is the killer: if you forgot to set the recording, you can control the network PVR with your mobile phone! Stuck in an unanticipated traffic jam while the game is about to start, no problem, take your phone and start to record. When you get home, some 15 minutes too late for the beginning, no problem! Just do the time-shift, and watch the game from the very beginning, in almost real time. As you skip the ads, you will catch up to the real time broadcast before the end of the game.
These are ways in which mobile TV is already being experienced, making money all around the world. It is not by watching the news clips and football highlights on 3GTV. It is through participation and personalisation. TV and video on 3G mobile will be huge, so let's give it a bit of time to evolve and discover its opportunities. As with any other mobile service idea, use the 6 M's to build value into your TV-mobile service. Forget about repurposing existing TV clips. •
Tomi T Ahonen is a bestselling author on 3G. He lectures at Oxford University's short courses on 3G, and is introducing a new course on 3G and TV for June 2006. His latest book is 'Communities Dominate Brands'. He can be contacted via e-mail: tomi@tomiahonen.com
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