Mobile video - Unreel expectations?

There's an audience, but is there a business model?

Can made-for-mobile video ever stand on its own two feet, or will it always be a showcase for film makers who want to graduate to ‘proper’ media like TV and cinema?

If you’ve been in the mobile content biz since the beginning, you’ll know that discussing the mobile video sector is a little like music fans talking about Britpop. It’s, like, so four hype-cycles ago.

And yet, as so often is the case, just when the hype turns to indifference a genuine market starts to develop. Although the official figures remain uninspiring – according to comScore, 6.5 million US subscribers (2.8 per cent) watch mobile video a month – use the evidence of your eyes. People are watching video on their iPhones, Toccos and Viewtys.

But what’s changed – and what’s slightly disappointing – is the fact that the mobile video market has become a re-purposing market. Most of the clips watched are just that: music videos, scaled down Aardman highlights and so on. Nothing wrong with this. It’s just that in 2005/6, I was constantly being alerted to ambitious made-for-mobile commissions. It was exciting, as if a new art form was being born.

Who remembers Nokia’s Nseries Studio, an attempt by the handset maker to showcase the video capabilities of its N93 phone? Impressively, Nokia hired Gary Oldman to shoot his own film. Less impressively, the actor delivered a movie called Donut, which showed a rubber ring in sub-dappled water.

More ambitious was Cell, a 20-part thriller by Endemol that told the story of a man who wakes to find himself trapped in a prison cell with no knowledge of how he got there. It was distributed by O2, which offered free instalments with contract upgrades. O2 was also the distributor of horror series, When Evil Calls, created by Zone Mobile and Pure Grass Films. At around the same time, Denmark’s Inmobia created the multi-part soaps POV Murder and Almost Hollywood, while in Singapore MediaCorp made the 30-part PS I Love You romance.

These films emerged at a time when major organisations were also looking at original mobile content. The UK broadcaster ITV hired Melissa Goodwin from Fremantle to head up its mobile unit. Under her tenure, ITV Mobile commissioned The Gym, Chaving It, New Fix, Hot Desk and Bitter Barney. The fact that Hot Desk was eventually turned into a TV series by ITV2 alone proved the unit’s worth.

Goodwin says: “Mobile is a good way to establish a brand without having to take it to mainstream TV. That was always my job: developing ideas for ITV and expanding the ITV brand.”

Sadly, although ITV Mobile balanced its books, the rest of ITV didn’t and the division will close this summer. Although Goodwin believes mobile video will come of age in a couple of years, she admits that original programming is a hard sell.

“You need a big brand and big talent to get distribution now. But how do you pay for it? Advertisers want results especially in today’s climate, so it’s hard to get sponsorship,” Goodwin adds.

It doesn’t help that so many producers are unrealistic about the technical and fiscal realities of the medium. “I got approaches all the time,” recalls Goodwin. “But most producers had no idea about basic things like pixellation and aspect ratios. Many weren’t interested in a revenue share and expected to make a fortune, which was never realistically going to happen.”

Although the mass market has not yet tuned into original mobile video, a small devoted audience – and a number of channels on which to reach it – does exist. This presents a sliver of opportunity to well-established, talented film makers. MTV, for example, has run a successful mobile unit since 2006 and developed original titles such as Meet Or Delete and TR3s. Over 100 million clips were viewed in 2008.

MTV has its own distribution, which helps. Fun Little Movies, on the other hand, has been delighting us with genuinely funny mobile series like Love Bites and Turbo Dates since 2005 with no network of its own. Instead, it relies on Sprint TV, Verizon, MTV, Comedy Central and others for visibility.

For founder Frank Chindamo, himself a screenwriter, the medium is all about the script. “Mobile is a writer’s medium,” he says. “It all depends on the writing. You could make a film on a phone and it would work if the script is right.”

Having said that, production values do count. Turbo Dates was lit and acted beautifully and co-written by Shrek writer Terry Rossio. Small wonder the episode ‘English As A Second Language’ won the Mofilm Grand Prize at Mobile World Congress earlier this year.

This kind of work illustrates that the medium can work artistically. And there are many festivals around the world – Denmark’s Dogma Mobile, Canada’s Mobifest, Holland’s Viva La Focus, Brazil’s Festival Do Minuto – showcasing the talent of amateur mobile film makers. One example is Mobile Postcard series by Peter Vadocz, which makes a movie of thousands of still pictures taken on a Nokia N95.

Mofilm remains the biggest festival. It has become a fixture of the Barcelona show, with its contest and those celeb backers such as Kevin Spacey and Isabella Rossellini. This June a new competition at the Cannes Lions 2009 Advertising Festival will be fronted by Spike Lee. With $120,000 in prizes, it’s a big deal. Still, it’s a big deal led by brands like Kodak, Visa and Unilever seeking cool associations, not really by consumer demand.

For those that depend on users actually buying stuff, the market is trickier. Mobile Streams bought Cyoshi, maker of Cat Bastard, Suicidal Squirrels and other gleefully twisted content, but has since remodelled the studio as a technical resource rather than a programmer.

Simon Buckingham, CEO of Mobile Streams, says: “Made for mobile is challenging. There hasn’t been a made for mobile video hit yet. No equivalent of Crazy Frog or Tetris. I believe there is a market, but for the moment the ...