For those of you who missed iHollywood Forum and NXTcomm’s Q&A with Survivor and Apprentice Producer Mark Burnett about the future of digital content delivery, just click on the image to the left to go a page with links to view the video. (About the middle of the page; Quicktime and Windows Media). NXTcomm is the replacement show for the giant Supercomm show, produced by the Telecommunications Industry Association and the U.S. Telecom Association. Burnett will be keynoting NXTcomm08, which is dedicated to the intersection of voice, data and content.

iHollywood Forum will be co-producing Communications Goes Green with NXTcomm on June 19 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Keynotes include AT&T’s Dorothy Attwood, Senior Vice President for Regulatory Planning & Policy and Chief Privacy Officer; and Verizon’s Kathryn C. Brown, Senior Vice President
Public Policy Development & Corporate Responsibility.

If you’re involved in IPTV, cable or broadcast TV content and infrastructure, and if environmental concerns are important to your business, this is the show for you.

Posted under Uncategorized

The big winner in Led Zeppelin’s announcement that the band’s songs will be available digitally is Verizon.

The phone giant will get ringtone and similar mobile rights first. On Nov. 13, Verizon will get full digital rights to classic songs like "Stairway to Heaven" and "Money", along with iTunes.

It’s still hard to find a kid who listens to songs on their mobile phone (my son does, but he’s a self-proclaimed geek).

Verizon is quietly building for the future, much as Microsoft takes initial losses against rivals and survives by virtue of its heft to attack again.

Verizon is a triple threat: it sells mobile phones; it sells Internet; and its TV service is expanding into millions of homes. Make that a quadruple threat: it has a mobile TV, service, too.

There are a lot more cellphones in the world than iPods. Led Zeppelin is just the beginning of Verizon’s plans.

See Also

• Led Zeppelin to Make Its Songs Available Digitally
• Mobile Entertainment Summit

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AT&T’s purchase of Aloha Partners puts Verizon’s mobile TV launch squarely in its cross-hairs.

Verizon uses Qualcomm’s competitive MediaFlo technology, which already broadcasts shows like "60 Minutes" and "CSI: New York" in more than 32 markets.

Aloha’s HiWire unit has quietly acquired 700 mhz spectrum in 281 markets covering more than 196 million while attention has focused on two other players: Verizon and its V Cast Mobile TV service; and Modeo, which scrapped plans for its own digital TV service over the summer.

Aloha’s acquisition would allow AT&T to leapfrog directly from its relatively slow network to broadcast-quality TV on mobile handsets.

Like all new mobile technologies, mobile TV’s consumer uptake will be slow. Mobile TV requires a new chip to be implanted in handsets, essentially turning them into tiny TVs capable of showing near-broadcast quality programming.

So both Verizon and AT&T will need to both order new specially-designed handsets and sell consumers on mobile TV. They’ll also face the task of differentiating the services from existing "TV" on cellphones, which operate off of the mobile Internet.

MediaFlo and Aloha’s DVbH technology operate on broadcast TV’s so-called "one-to-many" principle: consumers receive one signal that scales to millions of people without a cost increase.

Existing mobile video is "one-to-one", meaning every customer gets their own customized video stream. That means millions of people using the carriers’ existing mobile video services might cost more than they earn for the operators — potentially even crashing their networks.

AT&T says it may still decide to use Aloha’s spectrum for voice or data services. But its hard to believe that a company that’s invested billions of dollars in terrestrial IPTV services won’t grab this tailor-made opportunity in mobile. 

See Also

• AT&T Buys Aloha Wireless Spectrum
• AT&T Ends Aloha’s DTV Plans
• Verizon Fall DTV Line-Up
• iHollywood Forum’s IPTV World conference

Posted under Uncategorized

Ringtones Have a Mixed Week

Industry analysts have predicted for years that the mobile ringotne fad had to ebb sometime. While there have been signs that European taste for tones has come to a bit of a plateau, the latest M:Metric figues suggest that the U.S. still has a hearty taste for the custom ring-a-dings. About 9.4% of U.S. mobile subscribers, more than 20%, still download a ringtone in a given month, while about half as many do so throughout Europe.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the mobile press has made a very big deal over Verizon pulling then restoring the Bob Marley ringtone catalog to its phones this week. Sure this involved a rights issue with the Marley family, but was it really worth all the ink I have seen?

Similarly the silly "ringles" story  seems even more emtpy than the Marley saga. That music publishers want to add a ringtone to CD singles as a way to revive that market just seems like a desperate attempt at packaging novelty.

Lost in the shuffle of less important stories is the actual launch of Apple iTunes ringtones. You can right click on a song you have purchased and make a ringtone within iTunes that will pass on to your iPhone. The tool is very clever and easy to use. You get up to a 30-second clip, and you can drag the ringer window across the length of the audio timeline interface to make a ringtone of any piece of the song you want. This move toward true customization of ringtones in such an easy interface should be bigger news. Alas, Apple does not seem to have secured many labels in this deal, and the iTunes store makes it very difficult to find songs that are enabled for ringtones. This is one of Apple’s few missteps recently, but it certainly suggests the kind of tension that exists between the media industries and Apple’s iTunes model.

See Also

• Apple

Posted under Michael's Blog

Amp’d Users Get Another Week of Spotty Service

Updating our post of days ago on the imminent demise of MVNO Amp’d. According to the latest iteration of its Q&A, Amp’d Mobile will “potentially” shut down on July 31 instead of the original July 24 date. It may be a long slow crawl to MVNO death, however. Our Amp’d Mobile phone was getting very spotty service, including a lot of dropped links to video and music downloads. Not that Amp’d was very good at this stuff to begin with. We have played with the youth-oriented wireless provider’s content for over a year now and performance and reliability were never its hallmarks.

According to Forbes, Amp’d is holding an auction on July 31, so it is possible another carrier would pick it up from disgruntled partner Verizon. We’re not sure how that would work, since all of the Amp’d service and software is BREW-based to accommodate the Verizon network, and none of the other major North American players runs a BREW platform.

Posted under Michael's Blog

The demise of Amp’d Mobile should give all digital content providers pause about the real value of entertainment on cell phones

If all goes according to plan, high-flying MVNO Amp’d Mobile will be shutting down service to its 200,000 or so subscribers at 12:01 tomorrow morning. For details and background on the debacle see Rafat Ali’s coverage and the Q&A at the Amp’d site. Considering that this is the second big crash and burn of a content-driven MVNO in less than a year (Mobile ESPN) you have to wonder whether some of the underlying assumptions of mobile media are questionable and not just the MVNO model. How important is content to mobile? While people do ring up incremental sales from wallpapers, applications and ringtones, is that enough to sell phones and two-year contracts? Is content a real market mover?

Some will recall many in the indsutry calling the ESPN foray into mobile a “slam-dunk” because it was plugging into such a base of brand loyalists at their passion point. But reality sets in even for rabid sports fans when you have to pony up hundreds of dollars for a 3G phone and commit to $50 or more a month in fees. Amp’d was unabashedly a content-driven model. From the first time I spoke with former CEO Peter Adderton months before the MVNO’s launch, he argued that exclusive mobile media would sell this service. Young people were ready for mobile video and for a phone that entertained at least as effectively as it exchanged messages.  And with a small but growing core of youth, the model was appealing. Consistently, Amp’s executives argued to me that their ARPU (average revenue per user) was almost double industry averages because their users were buying so many  video downloads, graphics and games. At least one made-for-mobile series, “Lil ‘ Bush” actually broke out to prime time, now on Comdey Central.

See Also

• Amp’d Home Page

Posted under Michael's Blog