Mobile Video Finds Its Eyes

When major news of visual significance breaks — Janet Jackson's “wardrobe malfunction,” say — people in transit need not be left in the dark. Thanks to emerging video services, the well-outfitted mobile user is slowly gaining access to instant news reports, traffic and weather alerts, and sports highlights. But that's only if they happen to be mobile in one of the handful of Asian and European markets where carriers have started offering this service.

Comverse is doing its part to enlighten the rest of the world's carriers with its Mobile Video Portal. The service, which is currently in trials with European carriers that the company won't yet name, uses a video telephony session akin to an IVR that lets users either place a video call or browse available content via a carrier-branded portal. Initial trials have focused on providing entertainment fare like sports highlights, according to Comverse.

“The Video Portal is an early offering in what may be just television,” said James Colby, assistant vice president of marketing for Comverse.

With its background in messaging applications, however, Comverse can see a lot more uses for the service than just entertainment. Among the potential applications are video calling and video messaging (both outgoing and incoming) over mobile devices.

“We have a video strategy that is basically everything from a visual product up to rich content,” Colby said. “Video call answering is basically an extension to our messaging portfolio.”

For now, though, entertainment is where that action is. In Asia, where some carriers already have launched video service, almost two-thirds of the video content sent falls into two categories, according to Colby: traditional broadcast and adult. Convincing the rest of the world to hop on the bandwagon is a matter of showing the business model that works.

Comverse is still toying with different models, but sees its portal fitting best with the largest carriers that are able to manage content and perhaps even develop it on their own. “The market is still in a formative and exploratory stage,” Colby said

Others believe the answer is in outsourcing the whole thing and offering video as a value-added service.

MobiTV, which has a distribution deal with Sprint, aggregates and formats content from cable networks like MSNBC, Discovery and TLC. To the wireless carrier, the company looks like any other content provider, said Phillip Alvelda, chairman and CEO of MobiTV.

Under MobiTV's plan, customers pay a small premium for the service while the company supplements that revenue with ads.

“One of the benefits [of relying on ads] is our market skews very heavily to the young, hip early adopter,” Alvelda said.