If Consumers Get Really Good Video Apps, Can we Sell More Ads?
Today’s mobile video is tough to watch. Compressed so heavily that the quality just stinks. Regularly does not work at all. Even at a super low bit rate most of the time the video will stall or freeze and sometimes may take minutes to start. I read recently that close to 40% of video view attempts on mobile aborted before the video starts – people want it instantly. And the industry’s response to this is to compress the video further! We need to work in the other direction. Provide really wonderful quality video that brings to life the high end Smartphone displays and is consistently good – always! Without a strong video component that really works and is cool – consumers will not drive consumption higher and ad revenue up.
We believe that the quality of the playback is just about the most important characteristic of mobile video. If consumers can access consistently good video, with high-resolution playback that always starts instantly and never freezes, they will use their apps more often. The mobile video experience needs to be wonderful not frustrating. Only then can we generate significant revenue from mobile video apps. Heck, maybe then media companies can begin to monetize their content through subscriptions as well. No one would pay for today’s worse than frustrating mobile video. Until we fix the problem, mobile video will be restricted to non-mobile usage – in your office on wifi/fiber. It’s got to work well when roaming around.
Opanga’s Mobile CDN is built around the concept of wonderful HD video playback every time, without ever the possibility of a freeze. Fast forward or rewind video playback and watch it anywhere – on a plane, on a bus, in the city park – anywhere – always. And the Opanga Mobile CDN delivers this wonderful video experience without causing the wireless operators network any degradation – since our CDN publishes content to devices using only surplus network capacity. Soon, our operator partners will be offering Opanga based video apps outside a consumers data capped bucket. Lastly, Opanga makes the video available to consumers within minutes of publication by the content owner. Instantly available video, with wonderful mobile playback, without any network degradation. That sounds better….
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We have predicted the current capacity crunch for some time and over the past months we have seen almost every wireless operator around the world begin to cap their users on a monthly basis. This all to contain the damage of streaming video.
But the fact that wireline operators are now capping their consumers and willing to jeopardize something as important as customer satisfaction demonstrates exactly how dire the situation has become. AT&T in the US and Rogers in Canada have now announced caps on DSL and Cable.
Consider, for example, that Netflix is cutting the quality of streaming video in Canada and that Verizon is planning to “throttle” its most-active users when its network is stressed. They are trying to find a solution to a very complicated problem, which is commendable, but is it really wise to further diminish an already poor quality of experience for the customer? For sure the data cap will help as a band aid to their network capacity crunch but operators and media distributors alike must find new technologies that work for both sides.
So how can operators mitigate the impact capacity crunch without sacrificing the consumer experience? Unfortunately there isn’t a silver bullet. There is not a solution or tool on the market today that can single-handedly solve the capacity crunch. But there is some good news – there are a number of video delivery optimization solutions on the market today that can help ease the burden that mobile video places on the network.
Operators just need to be more realistic when they are evaluating them. For example, solutions that rely on bit-rate throttling or transcoding are akin to putting a bandaid on a shotgun wound. Sure, they reduce the amount of data flowing over the network, but it’s a relatively insignificant reduction that also often results in a poor end user experience.
Why not instead consider employing a strategy such as content pre-positioning, which provides consumers with a far superior playback experience on their device and maximizes the efficiency of the operators’ networks by leveraging underutilized capacity and flattening the peak loads. And it also enables innovative revenue growth applications that work outside of the cap.
It’s a win-win solution, in our opinion. The customers get great quality playback on an unlimited basis, operators get to save their networks and don’t need to invest billions so that media companies can monetize it and media companies continue to grow in the digital content distribution market.
What do you think?
What’s the easiest way to publish rich media and video-based content to mobile devices? Introducing NetRover ePublisher!
It’s been a busy month over here at Opanga (as evidenced by the lack of blog posts!) We’ve beenaccumulating record-breaking amounts of frequent flyer miles by trekking around the globe and meeting with savvy wireless operators who are searching for ways to alleviate the impact of mobile video on their networks, and on the homefront we’ve been busy growing our operations and working to protect our ever-expanding IP portfolio. And last (but certainly not least!), we’ve been preparing for the launch of our new NetRover ePublisher platform!
We are very excited to have officially launched NetRover ePublisher, and with good reason – we strongly feel that this is the solution that operators have been searching for to help address the challenges surrounding the impact of mobile video on wireless networks. You see, NetRover ePublisher is based on our patented NetRover technology, which transparently delivers large file video content using only surplus network capacity. But in addition to being extremely network friendly, NetRover ePublisher also enables operators to provide consumers with the high quality mobile video they have been craving.
NetRover ePublisher accomplishes this by pre-positioning any form of rich media, e.g. video, text, images, audio, into the mobile device memory. Pre-positioned content from subscription-based apps offers immediate and high-quality playback without freezing or buffering. Because the content is pre-positioned into device memory, the apps are always available, even when the device is offline.
We feel that NetRover ePublisher represents a tremendous advance in video delivery optimization technologies – by offering wireless operators and media companies a complete end-to-end media publishing platform that works outside data caps, we are providing them the tools that they need to thrive and succeed in today’s media-hungry world.
Instead of working against data caps, operators now have the tool they need to thrive within the cap. As an example, wireless operators typically offer their consumers a monthly service plan that includes voice minutes, text and a data bucket (e.g. 500MB “cap” for $25). This data cap severely limits the amount of video that a consumer will view and consequently will reduce the value of video and associated advertising.
With NetRover ePublisher, this base plan can be augmented to add a number of NetRover-enabled “channels” that would not count towards the consumer’s monthly cap. This is only possible because of Opanga’s unique network friendly distribution technology, which also offers revenue growth that complements data caps or tariffs.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about data caps (see “Is AT&T’s new 150GB DSL data cap justified?” and the capacity crunch (see “Netflix Meets Its Kryptonite”), and we are so proud to be offering a platform that helps ease the burden of these challenges.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on our news! Feel free to leave a comment or if you require an in-depth demo or briefing, shoot us an email at smarternetworks@opanga.com.
There has been much discussion recently about the merits of off-hour WiFi offload.
As mentioned in this recent Computerworld article, “Sony, SanDisk and several other technology providers have formed a group and proposed a standard that would use predictive software to pre-load content onto mobile devices in order to preempt buffering issue due to bandwidth bottlenecks.”
Sounds promising, right? But how exactly are these providers planning to “pre-load content?” After digging a little bit deeper, it became apparent that they were planning to use a technique called off-hour WiFi offloading, which at first glance might seem comparable to content pre-positioning, which is utilized by our NetRover platform.
After a quick comparison, however, several significant differences between the two technologies emerge. While both concepts aim to deliver content to a mobile device without burdening the network, consider the following:
- For off-hour WiFi offloading to work, there a multitude of requirements, including the availability of a WiFi network, the proper configuration of device settings and adequate smartphone battery life.
- In addition, latency is a significant issue as content cannot be delivered until the network provides a window of opportunity. Many times, this means that content is not being delivered until the wee hours of the morning.
- Many wireless operators do not own WiFi networks. So selling consumers on new video-based services that require them not to work on their mobile networks is a hard sale. Wireless operators and consumers need media to work on 3G (and 4G) networks – not restrict it only to WiFi.
This stands in stark contrast to NetRover’s content pre-positioning technology, which “roves” the network day and night to identify and utilize surplus capacity. In general, content pre-positioning is far more flexible than off-hour WiFi offloading as it is not dependant on WiFi and does not rely on a preconfigured schedule for content delivery.
Rather, content pre-positioning works on WiFi and 3G and continually works with the network to deliver content any time surplus capacity is identified. No preconfigured schedule required.
We think users need mobile video delivery technologies that actually make life easier, not ones that mandate a plethora of requirements in order to work. What do you think?
The Most Promising Technology in 2011 that People Are Starting to Talk About
Naturally CES was primarily focused on the latest and greatest devices – tablets and other connected CE devices were definitely the darlings of the show. But the bigger story was really how Internet connectivity is changing the way people watch – and expect to watch – video content.
In fact Ryan Lawler of GigaOM writes “If there’s one thing we learned from CES this year, it’s that there’s a paradigm shift happening in the way consumers discover and access content.” He notes that cable and satellite TV is becoming more like the online TV experience. “The cable program guide will become less important as a content discovery mechanism, and personalized recommendations will become a larger part of the way that consumers find videos they want to watch.”
In other words, consumers will be “ordering” the type of content they want to watch on the device they want. Currently this content is being delivering via some type of streaming technique, such as progressive download or adaptive rate streaming (HTTP Live Streaming, etc.).
As we know these delivery techniques require a tremendous amount of bandwidth and network capacity – especially when delivering higher quality video to tablets and connected TVs. It is the network owners who carry the burden of building and managing this capacity – and maintaining a high QoE.
They are struggling to keep up with demand and cover their costs. Case in point, we recently saw Sprint increase its unlimited data plan by $10/month.
Roger Entner of Recon Analytics aptly wrote about this in FierceWireless: “Sprint had to face the economic reality of success. Data usage and hence costs have increased substantially since it introduced its Simply Everything plan and it had to adjust prices to respond to this reality.”
We feel it is only a matter of time before Verizon feels the success of the iPhone and has to drop its unlimited data plan. Now is the time the industry needs to start talking about new ways to deliver data – outside of data caps.
Of course this is the position Opanga has held for the last few years. Since 2006, we’ve been developing and commercializing our content pre-positioning solutions that are designed to help operators manage the overwhelming network burden of delivering video while at the same time providing consumers with wonderful video applications on smartphones and tablets.
Our solutions manage the flow of content over constrained networks, actively seeking out surplus network capacity to transparently pre-position content in real time to any device without causing the network congestion or degradation typical of other video applications. We have invested substantially in our intellectual property rights (IPR) in this area and will soon announce some exciting developments.
And now we are seeing other companies jumping on the content pre-positioning bandwagon. For example, Alcatel-Lucent launched its Mobile Smartloading technology late last year, which was recently recognized by Andrew Seybold for the Most Innovative Mobile Technology at the 2011 Annual Choice Awards.
We predict that see more operators and content owners will be talking about how content pre-positioning is the most promising technology in 2011. You heard it here first.