Boston.TV wants to revolutionize local mobile video
Production company believes local content is key to mobile video success.
By Jim Barthold
Boston's Element Productions is spreading its video wings from TV to Web to mobile via a site, Boston.TV, that delivers a who's who, what's what of happenings in the Beantown area. If all goes well with the mobile trial--and the economy permits--the production company would like to take the local Boston.TV effort and go nationwide with an offering called Citylife.TV.
For now, though, Boston.TV is taking baby steps to ascertain the value of mobile content to users, carriers and advertisers in the Boston area.
"I'm slowing down my growth dreams until the time is right," said Eran Lobel, founder and CEO of Citylife.TV and Boston.TV. "We have great proof points and great business relationships in Boston and we're just going to continue to develop those and prove there is a real business in mobile and Web video."
While Boston.TV successfully regales the local community with videos about sports, news, entertainment and other activities on the Web and TV, its manifest destiny is to move onto a mobile platform and put this rich media into everyone's pocket at all times. Boston.TV uses Azuki Systems' Web-driven Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering to configure Web-based rich media that's managed by thePlatform, a Comcast-owned video asset management company and re-purposes it for viewing on mobile devices.
Lobel said Azuki instigated the relationship by approaching Boston.TV with a proposal to migrate its rich media onto mobile platforms. The two now are involved in a beta trial. Azuki, said Lobel, is "testing some advertisers they have" on the platform but Boston.TV's advertisers are a wait-and-see approach.
"Until there's something significant in terms of massive audience, the advertisers that we work with won't care about it," said Lobel. "I can go to advertisers and advertising agencies once Azuki and Boston.TV can show traction that will make them care."
Lobel said he's seen some of the initial instances of Boston.TV's rich media running across the iPhone platform and it looked "absolutely gorgeous." That video appears without AT&T buy-in and that's something Lobel would like to change.
"We are looking for a carrier, be it Verizon or AT&T, that we could do a longer term deal with producing unique content for Boston and then doing it for the other markets," he said.
Having content available on mobile browsers and media players, without carrier branding, is not necessarily a bad thing, said Azuki co-founder and vice president John Tremblay.
"Unless you're one of the top three to five applications on deck, it's not worth being on deck," Tremblay said. "People will never find you because you get buried. Everything we do with Boston.TV--or any other bigger name publisher--is done through the native browser as well as the native media player on the phone so there's no application to install and it's very easy for Boston.TV to reach its audience of anybody who has a video- or mobile browser-enabled phone."
That model follows what carriers have been saying about opening their 3G and 4G networks to network-agnostic outside applications. Video, especially, is perceived as a killer app.
"We're seeing a move from first-generation mobile Web that was a flat Web site to rich media video and audio onto mobile because the browsers and media players can handle it," Tremblay said.
That doesn't stop Lobel from pining for a carrier relationship that rivals the one Boston.TV has with Comcast Cable to produce the Celtics' basketball video-on-demand content.
"If phone carriers want to do that too with us, that's great. Our core competency is creating high-quality, low-cost original content (so) we're out there looking to partner with everyone we can," he said.
Moving content to mobile, attracting an audience and eventually attracting advertising support, is nascent but applications such as Boston.TV are a good start to getting off the Web and onto the handheld, Tremblay said.
"People have an affinity to Boston.TV as to what's going on in concerts and news and sports and restaurant reviews and they want to continue that experience on the mobile," Tremblay said.
Mobile video is a slow process but it holds a lot of promise, Lobel said. "Every technology conference I go to I see some really impressive technologies for mobile," he said. "Mobile is the next great frontier. It's a functional tool already. If content providers and advertisers can work together to take that to the next level of functionality ... that's really exciting."
The economy just has to cooperate a little more for this model to spread beyond Boston. "It will come down to finding sponsors or carriers that believe this is where they want to go," said Lobel. "We're well-suited to help them. We can produce the content; we already have established relationships in place for distribution."
Element Productions, he said, does its part by producing content for three screens: TV, Web and mobile, starting with high definition 16:9 video that is then compressed for quick online viewing. The final step is to move that beyond wires and into the ether and that's where Azuki uses using its compression and distribution capabilities to put the video on the phone.