World Telemedia: Budapest
Rating Great event — well orgaised and a mountain of podcasts and write-ups will be made available soon — but lets start with this!
Despite a late start, the World Telemedia conference in Budapest opened with some exciting presentations in the mobile TV and interaction space.
Argo Group’s COO, James Pearce, highlighted four categories associated with demand for watching mobile TV: Must watch, Killing time, Spontaneous Entertainment, and
Wallpaper.
He also commented that viewers would not be attracted to mobile advertising and would in fact be distracted by it (surprise surprise). What he did say which was extremely pertinent concerned the World Cup video services. Argo Group tested the quality of the video clips from mobile network operators and measured the acceptance. A voice caller usually commands quality of about 4-5 (on a special 1-5 rating scale) per call – but the test found the average video picture quality to be 2 and on a very good day 3. Basically, current video quality content is poor. Users are not satisfied.
However Mark Fitzgerald, MD of MX Telecom, did point out a demand and need in the market for video calling to live streams via short codes. He pointed out that this was the future and a clear and simple way to offer consumers interaction and video services. Unlike TV, which is often bugged with latency issues, video calling to live streams - such as horse racing - is indeed live. The magic of the service is that it’s affordable and very simple. There are no messy DRM issues and users can place bets whilst watching video. For example, users watch a video of a live horse race, decide to place a bet and are instantly directed to a betting operator to place this bet while the video feed is still on screen.
This is impressive and brings pay per call with a twist to the European market. On a more serious note, however, Mark did have a jab at SKY for its extremely low subsidy model for its TV and interaction services. He claimed that SKY is damaging the market.
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