My attention was grabbed the other day by this report: http://www.ellacoya.com/news/pdf/2007/NXTcommEllacoyaMediaAlert.pdf, the headline figure being that streaming video now accounts for 36% of all web traffic and that YouTube video alone accounts for 10% of all traffic of ALL types (including P2P) on the Internet. Quite staggering, and an indicator of how much people want to view video that matches their interest.
On the mobile, of course, YouTube is still in its absolute infancy. The iPhone and other mobile platforms have to make do with a tiny subset of the full library of YouTube videos, though this is set to change next year as Flash Lite 3 becomes widely available and included in new devices, so that Flash video (the YouTube standard) becomes possible on the mobile.
But a clear preference has been shown for what the likes of YouTube offers. And I don't mean silly videos of cats swimming or dogs skateboarding. I mean bite-sized videos of relevant content. Music videos from your favourite band, sketches from your favourite comedy show, video blogs from your Internet favourites, sporting highlights from the archives, that sort of thing. In each case, you'll have entered a search phrase and chosen from the supplied matches.
And, Flash Lite 3 permitting, this could happen on the mobile as well, as HSDPA becomes more pervasive and data plans get ever closer to flat rate across the board.
Well, that's the theory anyway. In an ideal world. Given the choice between video content that's chosen specifically by you and whatever happens to being broadcast at that second by the few channels available in our area over DVB-H (or a competing broadcast digital technology), wouldn't you choose the former? The problem is the bandwidth, with the sheer amount of data being passed around the 3G networks becoming a big problem as more and more people start to want to watch Internet-borne video on their phones. It's a scalability problem, as evidenced by the difficulties SlingMedia had demoing their video streaming solution to me at the Smartphone Show, where the 3G base station was pretty saturated.
DVB-H broadcast TV is the other extreme from YouTube video, with a one-to-many traditional model that doesn't use up data bandwidth and yet one which is ideally suited to phones and smartphones in terms of picture resolution, quality and video/audio bit rates. From what I've seen so far, DVB-H will work very well once the network operators sign up and install the necessary transmisson equipment in their base stations - how long this wil take in the UK is anybody's guess, of course. The need for a new infrastructure is the big Achilles heel of DVB-H but it should be possible in most European countries at least.
And in between we have a stop-gap solution in the shape of data-borne broadcast channels, with the likes of ROK TV and Orange TV. These work right now and work fairly well, but are destined to die out in the next few years as data bandwidth gets more and more congested, as more people switch to watching Flash video hosts like YouTube and as DVB-H gets (gradually) more integrated into the phone and smartphone world.
What about you? What video sources do you watch on your phone, if anything? Which of the three models mentioned above do you think will ultimately dominate? Here starts your Friday discussion!
Steve Litchfield, 26 October 2007