The Pragmatic Innovator

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….

Check out our latest mobile App – KOMO News Premium in the Android Market….The best Seattle news app available. See for yourself.

Off-Hour WiFi Offload: Capacity Crunch Silver Bullet?

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?