Multimedia Market Trends

The world of mobile multimedia has been around largely since the launch of the first 3G networks ten years ago in Japan.  During this time more, than 100 operators and service providers have sold video services to their subscribers and a number of trends are starting to emerge, especially during the past year.

While it is easy to throw out words such as personalization, social networks, and communities of interest – there is little consensus on what this means for multimedia services to mobile phones, PCs, and televisions (the three-screens).  However, we are seeing massive take up currently in all kinds of new video services to both 2.5 and 3G handsets.

A number of factors contribute to this market increase including: easy-to-use, simple and great video quality smart phones (think iPhone e.g.), better pricing by service providers, and even a good degree of marketing to promote these services.

Multimedia market trends is a very broad topic and we will be writing much more about this in the coming weeks and months.  For now, suffice it to say that we believe the market for multimedia across broadband and mobile is taking off now!

So what will the next 18 months bring for video services?  Which kind of services will people be using?  What macro economic and social trends are coming that will drive new services?

Video Network Optimization

What if you could squeeze 20-40% more bandwidth from the network while delivering quality services to subscribers at a lower cost?  Sound too good to be true?  People forget that MP3 technology allowed for the advent (eventually) of the iPod and other audio and video compression techniques enabled much of the services we take for granted today on our various devices.

The whole area of video network optimization requires an understanding of how multimedia is squeezed through the radio, core, and service layer networks. We will be expanding on this topic much more in coming posts.

Right now though, there are products available that take a lot of what our company has pioneered around transcoding to enable a huge amount of more video traffic at any given cell-site or radio network.

For instance (sales pitch ahead!):  Leveraging the transcoding and transrating capabilities of the Dilithium Content Adapter (DCA) allows existing network deployment to serve greater numbers of customers when serving video content over mobile broadband networks. Thus, our DVO solution reduces network build-out costs and provides quality video services with less radio, core and service layer components.

So how important will network video optimization be for service providers?  Will the end-customer be able to see a difference?  What are the true cost savings and benefits?