As technology continues to advance, people increasingly want better facilities. The same applies to watching TV programmes. Consumers are no longer content to watch shows as and when they are broadcast. They want to watch video when it is convenient for them, and that includes watching when they are on the go.

This change in attitude amongst the people is what is giving a boost to new services such as mobile TV and Video On Demand.

Services such as Hulu and Netflix that allow users to stream shows, are growing in popularity. The easy availability of WiFi services is leading more and more people watching shows of their choice on mobiles or tablet devices, when they are on the move, or waiting for an appointment.

A report recently published by Juniper finds that while mobile TV was watched by very few people in 2011, that number is set to grow in the years to come. Mobile TV revenues are set to reach $8.9 billion by 2016.

While tablets accounted for only 2% of mobile TV revenues in 2011, that figure is likely to jump to 10% by 2016. This growth will be largely because of continued integration of mobile TV services with pay-TV packages.

Digital Video Recording services such as TiVo and Sky + are already allowing users to timeshift their favourite programmes and this trend which is most popular in the USA is likely to increase in the coming years.

Global telecom technology and service provider, Ericsson has predicted in its latest Traffic and Market Data Report that the number of mobile broadband subscriptions will rise to an absurd-sounding 5 billion+ by 2016.

Though the number of such mobile broadband subscriptions was earlier expected to cross 1 billion by the end of this year, it is now being estimated that there will be about 900 million such subscriptions by the end of the year. The growth forecasts for 2016 are built on an expected year-on-year growth rate of 60%.

Mobile data traffic is likely to double this year. This is mainly due to the proliferation and availability of new devices such as smartphones and tablets. Smartphone traffic alone is expected to triple this year.

According to the report, users living on less than 1% of the earth’s land area (urban regions with over 1,000 people per square kilometer), will generate around 60% of this traffic. Video consumption on mobile devices is likely to be the main driver of this growth.

Ericsson also expects that the traffic generated by these advanced smartphones will rise 12-fold, and roughly equal mobile PC generated traffic by 2016.

Predicted growth of mobile data consumption (in PetaBytes)

The study, which received responses from over 16,000 participants, found that 75% of users access m.youtube.com primarily through mobile and 70% of them report that they access YouTube Mobile at least once a day. 58% of users spend at least 20 minutes per session on YouTube Mobile and 38% of users feel that YouTube Mobile is fast replacing desktop YouTube usage.

Another report, which was published by Nielsen, shows that YouTube Mobile has now turned into the number one mobile video viewing site in the U.S. with over 7.1 MM monthly unique users.

The growing usage of the mobile to access YouTube is, of course, a good thing for YouTube Mobile, but it is also beneficial to advertisers as they can now reach a much larger audience if they advertise on m.youtbe.com.

As an additional incentive to attract advertisers, YouTube Mobile has now made it possible for advertisers to purchase a daily roadblock running across all available ad impressions for a 24-hour period. The ads run on the search, browse and home page of the mobile website. Campaigns for a variety of products, ranging from entertainment and retail to auto and consumer packaged goods have been successful on YouTube Mobile. Advertisers often run the roadblock to coincide with a product launch or a sales event.

Among the reasons for the growing use of the mobile to access YouTube, could be the fact that the newer range of handsets and Wi-Fi services now available provide a better user experience for video viewing, with better network speeds. Also, the cost of viewing or downloading videos on the mobile has come down considerably compared to earlier, thanks to the availability of better data plans.

Ads run before and after videos on the service. While Sony BMG provides the music, Rhythm New Media is in charge of selling and serving the ads. The music video service was officially launched on the 31st of March. According to 3, the response to their free-to-access mobile video scheme has been excellent, with about 1 million users (25% of their clientele) signing up for the service by October 2007.

Signing up for free ad-funded music videos on 3 is quite simple. When a subscriber wants to start using this facility, he/she needs to simply visit the 3 music page, select the ‘opt-in’ option on the mobile screen, enter their age and gender.

Users can browse to select videos. A short pre-roll ad gets displayed before the video plays, followed by the music video the users selected and after that a post-roll ad gets played. In order to encourage customers to use this service without fear of exorbitant data charges being levied on them the word ‘FREE’ is prominently displayed next to each link.

Ads are shown to suit the demographic profile of the user according to the gender and age group they specified when opting into the service. Hence different users may see different ads before and after the same video. In order to check the efficacy of the system, a special link is provided on the main page for viewers who may be interested in participating in a survey that asks users of the service what brands they think they have recently seen being advertised on their mobile, what ads they have seen and the main message of an ad that they were shown.

Responses to the service have been very encouraging, with viewers viewing 3 videos per day on an average. 25% of them had spontaneous ad recall and 75% reported total message recall. 95% of users are happy with this service. Some top brands like Microsoft, Unilever Lynx, Nivea and Paramount pictures have already advertised through this format.

3 Official Press Release

“This is the first time that publishers have a meaningful way to take their content, be it in video, audio or image format, and put it on mobile”, says Scott Beaumont of Refresh Mobile.

The company, which has won Nokia’s Developer of the Year award for their Mobizines product, have developed an exciting range of new services designed to revolutionise mobile content publication. The new service launched this week brings video, audio and images embedded in RSS feeds to mobile devices.

Bringing Video To Mobile RSS Feeds

The Mippin service takes images embedded in RSS feeds, processes them separately and feeds them back in a format suitable to the mobile device. Videos embedded within RSS feeds get transcoded into 3gp format on the fly. High end devices can then stream that video content. Users with less sophisticated handsets would need to download videos to view them.

Videos are not actually transcoded by Mippin. The system identifies the user parameters and the video information. It then passes this on to BlueApple, who transcode and host the transcoded video. End users, however, do not see this process, and instead view the videos as if they were on the Mippin site itself.

Mippin has trumped the likes of Google, whose service FeedBurner does not currently deliver images, audio and video appropriately to mobile devices. Without Mippin the images and videos contained in an RSS feed will not work properly, and could cause problems loading the feed or even cause the mobile browser to crash if a user attempted to play the video in the feed, unless publishers created special mobile versions of every image, audio file and video stream.

Free Mobile Website Development

The next and even more exciting service from Refresh Mobile will be launched in the second week of March. This new service will provide publishers the tools needed to create a free-standing mobile website without the Mippin branding on it.

Mippin Maker, the new tool will allow a wide variety of publishers to take content from their current site, put it in an RSS feed and convert it into a mobile format in just 3 easy steps. According to Scott Beaumont of Refresh Mobile, “there are 120 million blogs with RSS feeds out there. Through the simple syndication all of these blogs are immediately open to all mobile devices. With the Mippin Maker publishers don’t need an incremental investment in mobile in order to get their content out there.”

While the Mippin Maker will not be suitable for mobile commerce sites, it could prove to be an invaluable tool for the scores of information sites currently online. A tool such as this one could bring us closer to wide-scale adoption of the mobile Internet, as more and more publishers will be able to easily bring their content to mobile, providing users the same wealth of information they are used to seeing on their PCs.

Screenshot of Mippin Maker

View Search Daily News On Mobile

Click the link above to view the mobile version of AccuraCast Search Daily News built via the the Mippin Maker, using the RSS feed from our site. Alternatively, you can view it on your mobile handset by visiting http://mippin.com/searchdailynews.