Wireless Informatics Blog

In 2006, it was hoped that the FIFA World Cup would be the catalyst that ignited mobile TV. A combination of passionate  sports fans, the growth of 3G networks and mobile TV standards and an assumption that consumers would pay for the convenience of world cup football anytime, anywhere was enough to convince the industry that their investments in mobile TV and broadcasts rights were about to come good.

It didn’t turn out that way. In fact, analysis after the event by US-based telecom consultants Telephia suggested that even those who had already subscribed to mobile TV services  didn’t use them to watch the football. In Italy just 6% of subscribers accessed football content, followed by Germany (4%), France (3%), Sweden (3%), UK (3%) and Spain (2%).

With the Beijing Olympics now firmly underway, have things changed? Are we now at the tipping point for mobile TV? The short answer, it seems, is no. And what a missed opportunity.

Global events of this nature are a marketing goldmine and represent a rare opportunity to introduce a large demographic to mobile TV services. Certainly, there are a handful of (largely Asian) operators that have looked to leverage consumer interest in the games, offering discounted TV services to subscribers. However even these providers are far from forthcoming in their marketing of the service. AT&T, who signed an exclusive agreement with NBC to stream coverage via its Qualcomm MediaFlo platform, bury the promotion of the service four layers deep on their website. Of course, most have not forged agreements with broadcast partners and make no mention of the games outside of trying to drive subscribers to web portals to check latest results?

Interestingly, it may not solely be an issue of broadcast rights. BBC Sport recently announced a deal to deliver video highlights to T-Mobile subscribers (although a search T-Mobile website didn’t offer any further information). In an accompanying interview, the head of BBC Sport suggested that the service could have been offered to more carriers if they had been able to cope with demands of video delivery: “We’ve had discussions with all the mobile operators, it hasn’t been possible to work with all of them on it. In terms of challenges, that’s been an interesting one… We have an editorial vision for what we want to achieve, but it’s working in the realities of the UK mobile market; there are challenges.”

The issue runs deeper than simply the availability of Olympic coverage on the mobile. Global events such as the summer games are rare; outside of the Olympics and FIFA World Cup there are few multi-event ‘events’ that attract such a global audience across such a diverse demographic. These events have the ability to capture public conciousness over a period of weeks. As such they are great platform from which to introduce consumers to wider data services - not just video. However, they seem sorely under utilized.

Even the spectators (500,000 visitors, 10,708 athletes, 70,000 volunteers, 17,600 press and 4,000 staff) represent an opportunity. I’m willing to bet that the Beijing Olympics will be the most photographed sporting event in history thanks to the ubiquity of camera phones. Now have a guess at the percentage of those photos that will be MMSd back home. Fears over data pricing, roaming charges and poor configuration will inhibit all but the most ardent user.

The mobile community stills struggles to deliver pricing transparency and deliver confidence to the end-user. As a PAYG user on Vodafone UK, you are presented with the following MMS / roaming charges for China.

Picture messages: £0.36 + data (charged at £8.00 per MB and billed in increments of 10kb)

So what will a typical MMS cost because I’m still none the wiser?

Even if you could afford the £6-8 per MB that most UK operators are quoting for data when roaming in China, there’s the issue of 3G, or at least the lack of it. China Mobile has so far concentrated its 3G strategy through a local standard called Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDM). TD-SCDMA is recognised by the International Telecommunication Union, but the standard sits aside from CDMA and CDMA 2000. The upshot is that 3G subscribers will automatically be connected to 2.5G technology offering much slower connection speeds.

Ultimately, a combination of mis-matched standards, less than transparent pricing, roaming fees, broadcast rights, network limitations and poor marketing have hampered an otherwise golden opportunity for the mobile industry to deliver on its promise of a truly converged, multimedia experience. All things considered it may be the games of London 2012 that prove to be the real tipping point.

The industry chatter around Nokia’s decision to move Symbian into the world of open source is quieting down, leaving time to reflect on the security implications of making several year old code available to the masses.

In the computing world there’s plenty of debate about the impact of opening up previously proprietary code. The primary concern being that an open source model exposes code not only to benevolent practitioners but also to malevolent attackers.

The anti-virus industry has already jumped onto the bandwagon, suggesting that the trend for mobile open source will bring a rise in virus outbreaks. However the risks run deeper. As in the PC world, malevolent attackers are incentivized by financial gain; phishing and ID Theft are two of the fastest growing online threats.

With much of the mobile industry steering towards m-commerce initiatives, potential security risks must be considered. The mobile terminal (including the SIM card) is being positioned as a trusted m-wallet solution with users able to transfer funds and pay for good and services through channels such as NFC (near field communications). Will the storage of highly personal data on the mobile device, combined with the world’s most commonplace mobile operating system going open source collide to become the catalyst that makes mobile security breaches a very threat?

In a closed source world, and possibly lulled into a false sense of security, developers can take short cuts that introduce security holes. But there’s no security through obscurity and opening up the codebase guarantees that any shortcuts are readily visible to the world.  

Conversely, green-field open source projects such as Android can benefit greatly from the open source community. The power of a collective community means security flaws are continuously peer reviewed by a large number of developers, each evaluating the code with a fresh pair of eyes and from different perspectives. 

So while green-field open source projects will be able to mitigate major security threats prior to mass-market adoption, it will be some time before a previously closed operating system reveals and patches all of its flaws.

Two weeks ago at Handsets World Berlin, I listened to Symbian’s research chief, David Wood, describe the challenges of open source. “People have been predicting the success of open source for years but fragementation is still too easy and integration is hard,” he stated.

On his blog, David clarifies his ‘open source leads to fragementation’ thinking. “At this point you may raise the question: isn’t open source meant to be somewhat magical in that you can all just look at it and fix it anyway; you don’t need to get the original person to come and fix it? But here we reach the crux of the matter. The problem is there is just too much code, there are such vast systems, it is not just a few hundred lines, or even a few thousand lines of code, there are hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code in these components and they are all interfacing together. So somebody looks at the code and they think, “Oh gosh, it is very complicated”, and they look and they look and they look and eventually they think, “Well if I change this line of code, it will probably work”, but then without realising it they have broken something else. And the project takes ages and ages to progress…

Well, at least David will be fully prepared and cognisant of the open source challenge following today’s announcement that Nokia (and friends) will unite Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP to create a single open source software platform and establish the Symbian Foundation.

I suspect Motorola will be more than happy to stop pouring money into UIQ following its 50% shared investment deal last year.

To enable the Foundation, Nokia plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that it does not already own and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola today announced their intention to contribute technology from UIQ and DOCOMO has also indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. From these contributions, the Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free license, from the Foundation’s first day of operations.

The announcement is a direct response to the Open Handset Alliance and leaves Windows Mobile on the periphery as the only OS not led by a consortium or offered under open source licensing models. With the commoditisation of the OS market now in full progress, it can’t be long before Microsoft responds - especially after it became clear that its strongest OEM partner, HTC, was also getting cosy with the OHA and Android.

Nokia’s purchase of the remaining Symbian shares is still subject to regulatory approval. It’s offer (approx $410 US) certainly makes commercial sense considering the company paid $250m in Symbian licensing fees last year.

Finally. If, in a world of open source, you are wondering about revenue models, WIF Magazine contributor Andreas Constantinou at VisionMobile offers a useful overview.

Is Mobile Web 2.0 a reality? At last week’s Mobile Web 2.0 Summit in London the slightly ironic answer was that most had trouble even believing in the term as a ‘concept’.

The event was designed to explore the meaning of Mobile Web 2.0 and discuss appropriate business models and key revenue drivers of the technology. Of all the industry specialists attending, most admitted that their applications were not generating any significant revenue. The reality is that most mobile web applications do not yet have a business model in place to determine how revenue will be generated outside of advertising.

Web 2.0 is an established evolution of the Internet and refers to the progression of web-services from static, one-way instances to platforms for user interaction, personalisation and user generated content. Although mobile devices now allow access and interaction with social networking sites, RSS feeds and podcasting etc, the general consensus was that these technologies are as yet to be used effectively within the Web 2.0 ecosystem.

Certainly, the mobile device’s inherent portability and multimedia feature-set make it more than just an access channel. But until more services start to be made for mobile’, the handset will struggle to deliver value outside of being just another pipe into existing online services.

The mobile device must find its own home in the world of Web 2.0. Consumers use their devices in different environments and circumstances than they do a PC. Mobile Web 2.0 must start to leverage this, building services from the ‘outside in’ rather than shoehorning existing web-services onto the mobile platform.