The Making of the Mobisode

The debate still rages over whether mobile TV will merely emulate the boob tube or find its own way in the world of entertainment, but media companies aren't waiting for the outcome. They're investing in original video content for the tiniest of screens and unleashing it on a handset near you.

The new show on Comedy Time, “Free Stylin',” is probably one of the stranger programs you'll ever see. It features would-be rapper Anala G and his human beat boxing counterpart Beatz (in real life, brothers Bret and Keith Ernst), hosting a hip-hop-themed call-in show in their mother's basement — HBO's Ali G meets Wayne's World. Anala G delivers his responses in the form of awkward improvised rhymes while Beatz lays down an oral rhythm of kick rolls and snare beats.

While the show's content is admittedly strange, the oddest thing about “Free Stylin'” is not the antics of its hosts but its format. First, it's incredibly short: Each episode comes in barely less than 3 minutes. Second, the camera zooms in ridiculously close to the two actors so their faces and torsos take up the entire video frame. The angle is so tight you can make out the Adidas label on the breast of Anala G's tracksuit, which is surprising considering that the screen resolution is so bad. The program would be unwatchable on even the smallest TV, and the picture only begins to depixelate if shrunk down to the tiniest window on a PC.

But that's just fine by the producers at Comedy Time. “Free Stylin'” was intended to be watched on the smallest of all screens: a mobile phone. “Free Stylin'” and the dozens of other shows and stand-up routines Comedy Time airs over MobiTV are part of the new breed of made-for-mobile content that has begun to emerge in the industry. In fact, new industry jargon has been added to the lexicon for just this type of content: the mobisode.

Just as the entertainment industry evolved as new media like the motion picture, radio, broadcast television and even cable emerged, video multimedia is evolving and adapting to the new format of mobility. It's a small business now, but a handful of companies are embracing the new format. All of the major television studios have begun producing their own unique television shows for the tiny screen. Some of those efforts are tied directly to popular TV shows: Fox and ABC have launched mobisode versions of their hit television shows “24” and “Lost,” respectively, following the plotlines of their broadcast counterparts but with their own scripts and casts. Others have created entirely new shows. Fox's original mobisode lineup included both a reality TV show and a drama series. Later this year, CBS plans to bring the first original soap opera to the handset.

The audience for this original mobile content is small, but it's certainly not negligible. According to data recently released by Telephia, 3 million people in the U.S. viewed some form of video content on their phones in the final quarter of 2005. That content could have been anything from a streamed newscast to a video mobile message service, and it certainly doesn't mean that all of those 3 million subscribed to a monthly service over which those mobisodes are broadcast. But it does show that at least 1.5% of the cell phone-wielding public was open to the idea of their phones being used as a video device. As more 3G phones are sold and the network technologies improve, the potential audience could become enormous. And that potential appears to be more than enough for the entertainment industry to work with today.

As Comedy Time proves, it isn't just the TV networks that are leading the innovation charge. Its founders, brothers David and Michael Goldman, never had any intention of grounding their new mobile network in broadcast TV. With the exception of some syndicated content from Chicago's SCTV, Comedy Time's content is comprised entirely of made-for-mobile shows — from the stand-up it films in Los Angeles to a handful of comedic self-produced mobisodes.

However, the brothers also had to deal with the challenges of creating an entirely new type of TV show — one with severe limitations that range from the tiny screen size to the poor bandwidth of the 2.5G networks available when MobiTV first launched. They were constrained by the extremely short average viewing times of the typical mobile TV watcher; the presuppositions of writers, directors and the comedians themselves, who were hardly accustomed to the impossibly narrow time length of the format; and finally, the budget. It became clear to CEO David Goldman that Comedy Time wasn't going to be recreating “Saturday Night Live” or Comedy Central on the mobile phone.

“We realized this was going to be the opposite of regular TV,” Goldman said. “Instead of very passive viewers, our customers would be very active. They'd open up the mobile phone, tune to Comedy Time and say, ‘OK, make me laugh.’”

A sitcom can build on plot and numerous themes and gradually flesh out a running joke throughout its 22-minute timeframe. Comedy Time, Goldman said, has to get to the first joke before 15 seconds are up. There's no room for subtlety; there's no room for dramatic license. There can be no scenery, very few props and very few people in any given shot.

Any stand-up act or sketch has to be shot in extreme close-up, Goldman said, but not too close. No one wants to see a disembodied head telling jokes on the screen. The screen has to convey some context, whether it's Mom's basement or a comedy club stage, and the cameras try to capture some of the body language key to many comedians' performances. But in its current incarnation, mobile comedy is forced to be a very auditory format. The subtleties of facial expression and body movement are difficult to discern even with the higher frame rates produced on 3G phones. A very visual actor has no place on Comedy Time unless he's ridiculously over the top, Goldman said. A comedian would have to have the elastic face of a Jim Carrey or the outrageous expressions of a Chris Farley to even register on the phone display.

The resulting format is the short sketch, with joke after joke. If there seems to be a lack of distinct punch lines, it's because there isn't much room for build-up. A lot of sketches are plain raunchy, such as shows like “Ultimate Wingman,” which features two men at a bar delivering a non-stop commentary about the anatomical features of women off-screen. Goldman admitted Comedy Time's humor runs toward the immature side, but he definitely takes exception to any characterization that Comedy Time going for the cheap laugh. It has adapted to the medium it was handed, he said. Nuanced humor has its place on the silver screen and in other long-play formats — just not on the cell phone.

“It may appear very sophomoric, but it's smart in the sense that it's well-written,” Goldman said. “I strive for stuff that's really unsubtle because subtle will never work on the phone.”

However the critics eventually judge Comedy Time, there's no denying that it's been a success within the, albeit limited, confines of mobile television. Though it competes against established TV brands like Fox, NBC, ABC, ESPN and the Discovery Channel, Comedy Time routinely ranks among the top five channels viewed on MobiTV's expansive channel lineup. MobiTV doesn't break out specific data, but it is by far the largest mobile TV provider in the country. This month it announced it had passed the 1 million active subscriber mark (though that figure also includes its European and Canadian operations).

In fact, although MobiTV's original business model embraced streaming live broadcast TV over the cellular network, much of its recent success has come from made-for-mobile channels. MSNBC, as the default station when the MobiTV application is launched, is still its leading network, but the Weather Channel — which produces a separate mobile broadcast — and the MobiTV-programmed Toon World cartoon station join Comedy Time and the directly streamed Fox Sports in the top five.

MobiTV Chief Operating Officer and co-founder Paul Scanlan said there isn't any kind of inherent conflict between two types of channels — there will always be room for both broadcast TV rebroadcast over the mobile phone and made-for-mobile TV. Certain channels lend themselves to being streamed live over the cellular network, he said, while others are just begging to be rethought for the mobile device.

A 24-hour news station like CNN is optimal for any type of broadcast, whether through the cable box or on the phone, he said. Perhaps when mobile TV gains wider audiences, the mobile stream will be tweaked with larger fonts and graphics, he said, but those would be minor editing changes. The core broadcast would remain the same. A major specialty network like MTV, however, might need to rethink its mobile strategy. A subscriber tuning into a mobile music channel for 10 minutes would probably expect to see music videos. MTV's typical programming block is full of anything but.

“Just streaming MTV may not be the best music experience for mobile television,” Scanlan said. “That format was really designed for broadcast television.”

Just as there is room for both traditional TV and made-for-mobile TV on the phone deck, there's also plenty of room for both established and new media brands, Scanlan said. CNN, ESPN and numerous other TV networks parlayed their success from the television screen to the Internet, but the Internet spawned new media giants like Yahoo and Google. The same is happening with mobile TV, Scanlan said — for every NBC Mobile and ESPN 3G TV, there will be a Comedy Time or some other new channel. However, he added, it ultimately will be the established entertainment brands that draw people to mobile TV. MobiTV subscribers may be tuning into Comedy Time, Toon World and other mobile-only channels in droves, but they come to the service because of the cache of channels like MSNBC and Fox Sports. The same thing happens in the cable world, where people sign up for service ostensibly to get ESPN and end up watching Bravo all day. There's a huge divide between perceived value and actual usage, Scanlan said, but it's a chasm that will continue to exist in the mobile TV world.

“We've found people unilaterally are looking for brands they're familiar with,” Scanlan said. “But those are not necessarily the channels that people are watching.”

If the mobisode has a birthplace, then it's most certainly the studios of News Corps' 20th Century Fox Television in Los Angeles — the incubator where new Fox shows are created. Shortly after taking over as head of FoxLab in 2002, producer Daniel Tibbets began showing off the video capabilities of his new Nokia 6600 to anyone who would pay attention at Fox Labs. Mobile TV had just appeared on the TV industry's radar, but all of the talk was about repurposed content — clips drawn from existing TV shows that would use the phone as a way to promote the Fox network lineup. Tibbets and Mitch Feinman, News Corps' vice president of digital strategy, however, proposed creating original shows that not only worked within the limitations but took advantage of the new medium.

The results were the first two mobisode concepts: “Love & Hate,” a “manipulated reality” show where actors following a loose script drew ordinary people into the plot, and “Sunset Hotel,” a more traditional drama series. They first aired in 2005 alongside Fox's “24:Conspiracy” as a series of 1-minute mobisodes on the Verizon Wireless and Vodafone 3G networks.

“Love & Hate” and “Sunset Hotel” never made it beyond their first seasons while “24:Conspiracy” continued into a second. The reason wasn't because they were bad shows, said Tibbets, who is now an executive vice president at GoTV Networks, heading up the provider's production arm, GoTV Studios; they were merely too isolated. They couldn't ride the popularity of an existing show like its counterpart, “24:Conspiracy.” “‘Love & Hate’ and ‘Sunset Hotel’ were never dear to the customers' minds,” Tibbets said. “They were, however, great experiments.”

Although the producers at Comedy Time were creating shows with multiple installments, each episode could be fairly isolated. Tibbets had to deal with creating a series where each episode advanced the overall storyline but also was self-contained — something extraordinarily difficult when you're only allotted a single minute. Tibbets said he couldn't just take a standard 26-minute show and cut it into 26 episodes. He had to create 26 shows in miniature, each with its own conflict and resolution, yet still fit them into the overall series.

“Every episode has to start with a conflict, a ‘screw you,’ and end with a question, a “what does this mean,' to carry it into the next episode,” Tibbets said. That's a lot for the consumer to absorb in 1 minute, and if the directors and writers tried to pack too much detail into one episode, viewers would often forget what they saw from episode to the next, Tibbets said. The mobisodes had to have an extremely heightened sense of drama, coupled with a very simplified premise, he said.

Lessons gleaned from “Love & Hate” and “Sunset Hotel” are being applied to all of Fox's current and future made-for-mobile TV efforts, Feinman said. The biggest change was the abandonment of the 1-minute episode length — it was just too constricting, he said. The network also realized that a tie-in to the broadcast program like “24” is the mobisode's biggest asset. Although mobile TV may eventually become big enough to support its own unique brands and shows, Feinman said, right now the industry has to take its cues from network programming itself. Fox is already continuing where “Love & Hate” left off, launching a mobile version of the reality TV show “The Simple Life.”

“This is all about nurturing a new consumer behavior, but changing people's behavior is a very hard thing to do,” Feinman said. “Early in this lifecycle, people really need name recognition.”

It's definitely a logical premise: The big TV brands will bring people to mobile TV. But it's a premise that one of Fox's main competitors seems determined to buck. CBS has yet to launch its first full-fledged mobisode, though it has been experimenting with made-for-mobile versions of its news programming and the show “Entertainment Tonight.” However, it plans to make its biggest splash later this year with the launch of the first mobile soap opera — but it's not tying that show back to any already established soap.

Instead, said Cyriac Roeding, vice president of wireless, CBS plans an original series with elements spread between its regular network programming, the mobile phone and its Internet portal. Although the mobisodes themselves will run on the phone deck, the show's concept is designed to push people to each of the three mediums, with the television show promoting the mobisode, the mobisode promoting the network and personalization provided by the Internet. In fact, Roeding believes that the ultimate direction of mobile TV isn't as black and white as the industry makes it out to be. The debate over made-for-mobile versus repurposed or live TV and established brands versus new ones assumes that mobile TV and regular TV will be completely separate media. From Roeding's viewpoint, the two will meld together, creating a broader TV ecosystem with tendrils linking back to the wired and wireless Internet.

“Most people think of mobile TV as a restricted television, but it's not,” Roeding said. “Mobile TV is just a completely different instrument. It has completely different capabilities. It addresses different usage situations, but not a different audience.”

Roeding is looking at the home TV set and the phone screen as part of the same continuum — the TV you take everywhere. The way that content is produced, edited and formatted may be different from one platform to the other, but the content itself is essentially the same. Perhaps thinking of mobile TV as a separate medium evolving independently from broadcast TV is the wrong approach. If Fox and ABC can create miniature spin-offs of “24” and “Lost” for the mobile phone, maybe Comedy Time can bring the “Free Stylin'” brothers to the living room screen.

Perhaps at some point, new programming will be launched simultaneously across both the broadcast and cellular network, and the distinction between TV show and mobile TV show will simply cease to exist.