Streaming on the Go

While this reality may introduce hurdles that have to be overcome, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. "This is a tough space to be in; you have to be ready to support more than 400 devices. You have got to really understand the engineering of every step of the process, otherwise you’re going to fail," says SmartVideo’s Bennett. "The challenges for getting into this space are horrendous. Once you’re in there though, those are great barriers to entry [for potential competitors]." Another advantage of the rapid evolution of handsets is that it’s becoming more and more likely that a consumer will have a phone that’s capable of streaming rich media.

The other major challenge is the current state of wireless networks in the U.S., especially compared to the wired broadband industry as it relates to creating an environment for streaming. "The fundamental difference is the gross, gross instability of the wireless carriers’ networks," says Bennett. "Bandwidth fluctuations can vary dramatically up and down and can be instantaneous. Typically with a dialup connection it will fluctuate 15-20%," while wireless networks can fluctuate 50-70%.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a problem with an easy solution. "The problem gets better, then it gets worse," Bennett continues. "The carriers build out a certain capacity, then it becomes saturated. As soon as it becomes saturated it becomes in instable. It’s in a constant cycle of good then bad, and it varies all over the country." The adoption of 3G networks will help, but it’s questionable as to whether or not capacity will be able to keep up with demand. Simply put, "cellular networks are not a great place to be doing streaming," says Bennett.

A New Medium for a New Audience
Most of these problems, though, are issues that the content delivery networks need to worry about more than the content providers themselves, who have another set of problems to deal with. "If you’re a content owner, not only do you have to understand the CDN perspective, you also have to make sense of the audience adoption, which has further obscured information," says Nine Systems’ Snyder. "Without actually publishing the content out there, you don’t get to see the results. You actually have to go through with deployments to see which are successful and which aren’t. And that would be before you deploy any gateway services and before you collect any fees."

To date, mobile content delivery just hasn’t been around long enough to establish any certainties in terms of what kinds of content users want to view on their handheld devices. "At this point it’s still very early in the market. The amount of content that’s being produced for mobiles is absolutely dwarfed by the amount of content that’s available through other distribution channels," says Phillip Alvelda, CEO of MobiTV, a "global television network" that delivers live TV to Java- or BREW-enabled handsets over several of the largest cellular networks in the U.S. "It’s hard to tell in many cases what’s preferred."

Alvelda points to some of the lessons he’s learned that help get the process started of defining users’ mobile viewing needs and wants. "I’d break it down into two broad categories. One is the live TV stream. You have a level of time sensitivity and immediacy that you can’t capture with a clip that’s produced an hour later," says Alvelda. News and sports are two categories of content that most benefit from this sense of immediacy. "Live content seems to have tremendous value both in terms of marketing messages and perceived value," says Alvelda.