CMO Ray DeRenzo on the evolution of mobile TV.
MobiTV is one of the veteran companies in the mobile entertainment industry, working initially with operators on their mobile TV services, before capitalising on the apps boom in more recent times.
ME talked to CMO Ray DeRenzo about what the company has been up to, starting with its big numbers from the recent World Cup, for which it screened live matches in the US courtesy of a deal with ESPN.
"It was a roaring success," he says. "We covered all 64 games across 35 devices, including iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. During the course of the tournament, we streamed well over 100 million minutes of video content, of which 72 million minutes was live game coverage."
More stats: MobiTV's ESPN channel attracted around one million unique viewers during the World Cup, and that single channel in a month generated traffic equivalent to 5% of MobiTV's total traffic on all channels for the previous 12 months.
"People were watching on average 30 minutes per match, compared to the average MobiTV session of five minutes," adds DeRenzo. "Nearly 40% of viewers watched four or more games, too. It was compelling content."
He also says that MobiTV saw a clear link between viewing time and screen size: people with handsets like the iPhone with bigger screens watched nearly twice as much World Cup as those with smaller screens.
The key stat for MobiTV, though, is that during the World Cup, downloads of its iPhone app - AND paid subscriptions to its service - increased threefold, according to DeRenzo.
That was helped by ESPN marketing MobiTV's app within its own mobile apps and properties during the tournament, using deep-linking to take users directly into the MobiTV app to watch matches (if they already had a subscription), or to a payment page if not.
With the World Cup done and dusted, MobiTV is turning its attentions to developments in the technology used to distribute mobile TV, and specifically those that involve tapping into the broadcast spectrum, rather than using 3G.
"Clearly there is a use case around broadcast, as one of the major issues when we talk about the World Cup is that while it's great having one million unique users, or 50-60,000 concurrent users watching at any one time, that taxes the wireless networks of the operators."
DeRenzo says MobiTV strongly supports the idea of using broadcast technologies to take the strain, and it worked with O2 several years ago on a trial in the UK.
However, he also warns that while broadcast is great for one-to-many events like the World Cup, it has its limitations.
"For content like interactive elements - on-demand, pause and fast forward, clicking out to a commerce opportunity, polling or chatting - you cannot do those things easily on broadcast networks, and in some cases cannot do them at all."
In other words, the answer is likely to be the combination of using broadcast to deliver the video, and 3G/4G/Wi-Fi networks to deliver the interactive aspects.
On the mobile networks front, what about net neutrality? Google and Verizon are being fiercely criticised this week for seemingly abandoning the principle when it comes to wireless, so what does MobiTV think - given its status as one of the services that will help strain these networks?
"Net neutrality? We are active observers," says DeRenzo. "We have not really come out with a public MobiTV position around the discussions that are taking place around net neutrality. We believe there should be free and open access to IP-based applications, but we are sure it will sort itself out. It's becoming much more of a policy-informed decision."
A question about iPad leads to perhaps the most interesting section of the interview though.
DeRenzo says there is no doubt that iPads and tablets make for an excellent experience when watching TV content - but that this is causing some headaches within the TV industry.
"When broadcasters look at an iPhone or similar device, they clearly see that as a complementary experience to home television," he says. "No one is going to disconnect their home TV because they can watch broadcast content on a mobile phone."
Tablets? They're a different story, since once you start having TV-capable devices with seven and ten-inch screens, the broadcasters see them more as potential competition to the home TV, rather than a companion device.
The net effect? "It is three to four times more expensive to license the same piece of content for a tablet than for a mobile phone," says DeRenzo.
"I can programme a package of content on mobile and make it available for $10 a month in the US, but if I take that same lineup of content and make it available on the tablet, I'm going to have to charge more like $30. And at $30, there is not a market for that product."
Why is this the case? DeRenzo says rightsholders are very excited about the technical capabilities of tablets, but worried that if they make their content available more cheaply for tablets, they might also have to make it available more cheaply to their existing cable and satellite distribution partners.
"From our perspective, tablets are core to our business evolution, and we are building tablet products," says DeRenzo. "The complicating factor is acquiring the content on a sound economic basis."
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