Dear Readers:
You're tired of hearing me say it, but you don't have to interact ON television in order to interact WITH television. Dual-screen experiences with traditional television and companion devices (smartphones, tablets and all like such as that) really do make sense. And adding the exploding handheld distribution to the growth of set-top box based interactivity can benefit advertisers, programmers, distributors AND consumers.
But when the video meets the screen (analogous to the rubber meeting the road) on handheld devices, we have real problems. Even the fastest 3G and 4G networks depend on the mobile equivalent of "the last mile." I noticed it just the other day riding to New York on Amtrak. I was watching streaming video (canned, not live) on Verizon V-Cast. And the video quality was terrific until just north of Philadelphia. At that point, whether because of lousy tower spacing, increased usage or the phases of the moon, the video started pausing, buffering, pixelating and getting impossible to watch.
Now if I was at home using my smartphone to grab behind-the-scenes video related to a television program my wife and I were watching, and that happened...well, suffice it to say we'd test the real durability of a BlackBerry Bold.
Controlling, monitoring and adapting the video streams to keep that from happening, even if it means a slight reduction in video quality, is critical as the industry is building out the wireless infrastructure; and given that the consumer usage appears to always be ahead of the infrastructure, that may be a problem we have to live with for a long time. And the wired companies, who are also the content companies, who sell advertising to the people with money, in order to deliver content to the viewers--they all depend on a seamless, intuitive, entertaining and relaxed consumer experience. Which means everybody has a stake in streaming video to wireless devices.
So, to try to get a handle on how to deal with these variable streaming issues, I turned to an old friend--Alex Libkind.
Alex was a founder of Zodiac Games forward slash Zodiac Interactive--the group that TWC's Mike Hayashi affectionately referred to as "my crazy Russians." He sold his share of Zodiac a few years back and jumped headlong into the smartphone space, founding Appsolute Media, a digital media agency and seed venture fund. Alex still has an astonishing pool of engineers in Eastern European cities I can't pronounce, and I learned the other day that he has a solution to our crummy mobile video quality.
iTV Doctor: Alex, what is Appsolute Media? And, all kidding aside, where are your engineers?
Libkind: Appsolute Media is a digital agency and seed venture fund. We work with traditional agencies to help them expand their traditional campaigns to the digital space--everything from Web to mobile. These are campaigns that reach the consumer directly and get them interacting with the brand. The other side of our business is a seed venture fund where we incubate early-stage ideas and have had some early successes including the leading nightlife app on the iPhone, a number of games, and a soon-to-be-released make-up application with Carmindy from the hit TV show, "What Not to Wear." We do most of our project management and design in New York, but we have satellite development offices in Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
iTV Doctor: Can you give us the technical reasons why our mobile streaming video is so crappy?
Libkind: The main reason is that streaming video was not built for the mobile environment, where the bandwidth changes quite rapidly. Just walking a few paces in my house will take my four bars down to one bar, and then my video will stagger, start buffering etc. Therefore an adaptable streaming technology needs to be created to take into account the vagaries of the mobile environment.
iTV Doctor: Now the mobile companies are certainly working to solve that problem. What are they doing now?
Libkind: I am sure all the companies are looking at a number of adaptable streaming technologies: they have to--or, as you said, we will get fed up and just stop using the service. However, I am not certain anyone has really hit on the ultimate solution.
iTV Doctor: And what's your solution?/
Libkind: We are working with Crystal Reality, which is a St. Petersburg, Russia-based technology company, that now has one of the top downloaded apps in Russia--Crystal TV--to stream Russian television. They created a unique, patent-pending gearbox technology which in effect works like your car transmission. They encode the streams in multiple bit rates and the server-based streamer is the transmission which shifts gears based on the signals that are sent by the end-client--be it Flash, an iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Mobile or your old Nokia phone. This way the picture is adapted on the streaming side to the bandwidth that is currently available on the client device.
iTV Doctor: Is it being used anywhere?
Libkind: This is being used very successfully in Russia, with over a million active subscribers, and if you are a Russian speaker you can get all your Russian channels right now on Crystal TV--so enjoy it! Crystal Reality TV technology is also used by the Yota TV service of Yota--a Russian nationwide WiMAX Internet provider--for their world's first GSM and WiMAX phone: HTC Max 4G. Now Appsolute Media is working with Crystal Reality to bring this technology to the US.
iTV Doctor: In the US, who might be your customers for Crystal? And why would they need you?/
Libkind: I think any of the telcos, cable operators or satellite operators that are planning or trying to stream live video to end-devices should seriously consider Crystal. Until they can create a robust environment to work on ALL mobile and desktop clients and in all bandwidth environments, then the promise of live TV anywhere will be far out of reach. Sure, they will be able to deliver video-on-demand with enough buffering, but to deliver true live feeds with less than 30 seconds of buffering is the holy grail.
iTV Doctor: Great. Thanks. And I understand you still have your hand in the games space. But we'll talk about that another time.
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The iTV Doctor is *Rick Howe*, who provides interactive television consulting services to programmers and advertisers. He is the recipient of a CTAM Tami Award for retention marketing and this year was nominated to Cable Pioneers. He is also the co-author of a patent for the use of multiscreen mosaics in EPG's. Endorsed by top cable and satellite distributors, "Dr" Howe still makes house calls, and the first visit is always free. His services include product development, distribution strategy and the development of low-cost interactive applications for rapid deployment across all platforms. Have a question for the iTV Doctor? Email him at itvdoctor@itvt.com
