Caution, dumbing pipes

SmartVideo recently announced it is developing a free music video channel, paid for by advertising, that it will ship to any PDA or smartphone with a 2.5G connection or higher.

The TV model has been penetrating into the mobile video market for some time, but this is an extreme step by any stretch of the imagination. Music videos are among those few bits of video content that mobile users have demonstrated they'll pay for.

Of course, nothing's really free. There are no FCC limitations on commercial-to-content ratios, so expect to see a lot of ads. And since you're still paying for your data access, you'll be paying to see those ads — especially if your carrier's charging you by the megabit

SmartVideo's move demonstrates that despite carriers' unwillingness to cooperate, there are a lot of content providers that want to use carrier networks as dumb pipes. And they're finding innovative ways to do it. A commercial music TV model is nothing foreign to a generation raised on MTV and VH1, so customers probably won't balk at the idea if the content is fresh.

In fact, consumers have shown they'll put up with a lot of garbage, if they can get something gratis. The last generation of free peer-to-peer download services all carried massive advertising and spyware that millions of users were willing to receive. Plus, most carriers are still running ads over their paid video services, so why pay extra for the same thing?

The key is whether SmartVideo and other content companies using the dumb pipe can maintain consistency and quality. Carriers have always maintained that they can deliver services more efficiently with better quality of service over their own networks. Well, SmartVideo says it's supporting Windows Media Player now and other video players in the near future, and it's promising 24 frames per second of image quality — that's higher than Verizon Wireless' Vcast. Do you see where this is heading?