Two-way mobile video: Sharing experiences at the point of inspiration

By Chris Hill, Vice President of Marketing, Mobidia, Inc.

Live video sharing from a mobile phone has finally made it to the U.S. Live video sharing--not to be confused with recording live video and sharing it via MMS or posting it to your MySpace site--lets mobile phone users share experiences while they happen by streaming live video from one handset to another. As many know, this experience has been available for some time in Europe and Asia, yet adoption rates have been slow. The service has been hampered by poor video quality, handset availability, network upgrade requirements, and the overall cost to the user of service and handsets.

The good news is that the technology has evolved and improved, as it always does, and most of these barriers have been addressed. But positioning a live video-sharing service and then failing to deliver a full solution could depress initial adoption rates here in the U.S.

Many providers in Europe and Asia decided to target business users, touting live video sharing as a means to enhance business conversations. This is a curious decision. In the era where a young blogger receives 35,000 text messages a month, and a 17-year-old holes himself up for days to re-wire his iPhone, it is clear that tech-savvy, mobile-dependent youth are the market segment most likely to adopt and value new handset technologies.

And there is good data that confirms that to be the case with live video. A study by Instat in 2006 indicates that just under 30 percent of young U.S. mobile subscribers were extremely interested or very interested in having a "see what I see" video service on their mobile phones. It is reasonable to assume that with the increasing number of handsets with video capability, increasing use of MMS and decreasing handset prices over the last 12 months, the number of young subscribers interested in live mobile video is even higher today.

So the demand is here and the technology is here. But unfortunately, the live video service recently launched in the U.S. only provides one-way video. This is not the experience that the young subscribers most likely to use this service really want. To understand why they do not want one-way video, it is necessary to consider how this market segment thinks and what motivates it. Mobidia, a live video sharing technology vendor, recently completed extensive research what this market segment wants in a video-sharing service, and the findings are quite revealing.

Young people from 15 to 25 years old are heavy users of mobile phones. They are incredibly social beings, and the mobile phone provides a very flexible tool for communicating and interacting with their communities, providing multiple forms of communications from virtually any location. The phone is this market's primary means of communication, entertainment and sharing. Most young users are snapping and sharing photos, taking video, and sending and receiving large numbers of text messages. Most send many more text messages than e-mails, and those in their pre-college years use texting almost exclusively. Young users almost always give "immediacy" as their primary reason for using these applications. This is not surprising--this is the generation that grew up with Google for immediate information, iTunes for immediate music purchases, and video on demand.

Thus it should not be surprising that this generation also expects immediacy of live video sharing on their mobile phones. They view live video as a way to enhance how they connect to and communicate with their family and friends. They also view it as a means of entertainment and interaction. When polled about likely usage scenarios, young men overwhelmingly said they want to use live video sharing as a way to have fun: They want to show their buddies something funny or someone doing something funny--to share a laugh. The young women were excited about the possibilities of receiving immediate feedback while shopping at the mall. Other popular scenarios included sharing a moment at a sports event or concert, connecting with absent friends from a party, or communicating "just for fun." In all of these scenarios, users expect the experience to be immediate and interactive. Those sending video also want to receive video--they want to visually experience their friends' reaction or share in the experience that may be occurring on the other end of the connection.

A two-way video stream was valued extremely highly. Many viewed a one-way stream as a passive experience that might be interesting on one level but a much lesser experience when compared to being able to receive as well as send video. Many equated a one-way stream to an experience very similar to receiving an MMS with a video or downloading a video from YouTube. While these are valued experiences, most phone users already have this capability and would not be willing to purchase an additional service that would provide an experience very similar to that of existing services.

However, the youth market clearly values the experience of two-way video sharing and is willing to pay a premium for it. They view it as another way to communicate and connect with their friends for entertainment and interaction. Two-way video technology is available today that meets the expectations of young mobile-phone users, enabling mobile operators to provide a two-way live video experience, sending and receiving video in a live stream directly from and to handsets via a peer-to-peer connection. This technology does not require any new network infrastructure, and implemented using solutions from vendors with RF expertise, the two-way video service will work in 2.5G environments as well as in the latest 3G and IMS environments.

Live video on mobile phones is finally here, and it looks like it will be here to stay. But mobile operators should consider the full experience--and the experience that the mobile-centric youth market desires. No one would consider offering a one-way voice calling service. A one-way video service may prove to be just as uninteresting.