Mobile should be seen AND heard

Big shows are all about emerging industry trends and CommunicAsia in Singapore this week is no exception, with a number of mobile and wireless fads and fashions on the horizon. Of all the hype, however, no trend is so great or prevalent as the mobile video phenomenon, taking Asia and the world by storm.

The stats certainly support the trend’s explosion. There are some two billion YouTube views a day, regional digital TV is predicted to grow 110% over the next five years and Cisco’s Visual Networking Index has posited that global video will make up for 91% of consumer IP traffic by 2014 and will surpass P2P traffic before the end of this year.
With this amount of potential, it’s not hard to see why firms like Singaporean operator, Singtel, or big companies like Ericsson are jumping on the video, and 3D video, bandwagon.
At CommunicAsia itself Singtel is touting its bombastic claims of “first to do 3D” with its partner Inmarsat, while Ericsson is showing off its “end to endless TV” concept, also with 3D, a home gateway and IPTV remote device.
“Our ambition is to make these new TV experiences a mass market reality throughout the region,” said Dario Choi, Ericsson’s head of Asia Pacific TV solution group.
While some dream of mass market mobile video flooding, however, the exploding bandwidth requirements are a nightmare to operators who are being faced with tough choices in order to stop their already stressed networks from clogging up.

In the US, AT&T has already said it will be putting caps on data usage, while O2 is doing the same in Europe. More operators are highly likely to follow suit. Charging more for data usage, however, is a very difficult move to make when faced with consumers who are expecting to pay less and less for everything.
Another way carriers could tackle the problem is through bandwidth throttling, a move Sprint is said to be mulling, but which is bitterly unpopular with content providers and power users alike.
The third solution – and one which is getting rather a lot of air-time here at CommunicAsia – is for carriers to find new revenue models which would bear the weight of the massive Capex and Opex being spent by carriers. The view is that rather than limiting video on mobile, carriers should increase the amount of value added services (VAS) to pull in the revenue to cover the costs.
While this sounds sensible enough, it remains to be seen which route carriers will ultimately choose, but one thing is for certain: mobile video doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon, and with the user base increasing daily, when it comes to videos on mobile, carriers will have to either put up or shut up.