Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Finally, nobody else cares either

An interesting story on Ad Age about the fact that no one seems to care about video on their mobile phones. Over the past few years, this was seen as the "next big thing" for both media companies and advertisers. I've always looked at it and wondered what the big deal is. Video is slow to get over a phone and the quality is never great. The screen on my Treo 650 is gargantuan by most cell phone standards, but you still couldn't pay me to watch video on it.

There just doesn't seem to be a good fit for video on a cell phone. Do you offer full episodes of TV, or movies? Who wants to watch that on such a small screen. Ok. Then what do you offer? Maybe short videos that tie into larger media (movies, TV). It had better be truly great content to make me want to wrestle with most phone interfaces to get ahold of it.

The thing is they aren't offering anything truly innovative. They just look at the massive cell phone market and want to find a way to tap into it. Understandable, but desire to make money doesn't appear to be enough in this case.

The money quote of the article is this "The only thing holding up the explosion of the mobile phone content and advertising business continues to be the lack of interested viewers, panelists bemoaned at the second annual NATPE Mobile conference here."

AdPulp summed that quote up best with a quote of their own: "That's like saying "The only thing preventing me from getting laid every night continues to be the lack of interested chicks.""

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has never seen the appeal of mobile video.

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