Mobile Video: Not Just Cell Phones
By Tom Steinert-Threlkeld -- Multichannel News, 9/13/2006 1:05:00 PM
New York -- Mobile video is “very quickly going to mass” adoption, according to Marvin O. Davis, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Comcast, the nation’s largest cable-system operator.
But Davis -- speaking at the Blue Ribbon Breakfast of the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing Thursday at the Grand Hyatt Hotel here -- was not just talking about watching television programming on cellular phones.
Widespread viewing on mobile phones is still in its infancy, he and other panelists -- such as John Zehr, VP of product development for ESPN Mobile -- said. What’s proliferating instead is impromptu use of a diverse set of screens in different ways.
Most immediately being adopted are mobile DVD players, which allow commuters and vacationers to watch movies in trains, cars and planes on their way to their final destinations.
Laptops have also become mobile-video players. But according to Jason Krikorian, chief financial officer and VP of business development for Sling Media, those machines are becoming mobile players where you might least have expected it a couple years ago -- not on the road and not in the office.
“People are buying laptops that never leave the home,” he added. Their purpose: to act as digital recorders and playback machines, or immediate playback devices, on any floor or room in the home, or on back decks -- wherever a person wants to watch video or view other content received via a wireless connection to the Internet.
Cable-system operators could extend the mobile reach of their local systems by working with Sling Media to put its Slingbox in subscribers’ homes, panelists acknowledged. That would let their customers watch their local cable programming in hotels or anywhere across the country they could get high-speed connections to the Internet.
Krikorian said Sling Media has talked with all major cable-system operators about possible partnerships in delivering programming through its technology to cable subscribers moving about the country.
But neither Davis nor Arthur Orduna, senior VP of policy and product at Advance/Newhouse Communications, would comment on how they might structure partnerships with Sling Media, even though Davis declared the Slingbox a “great product.”
