Record TV programs onto your mobile phone

PVR (Personal Video Recording) is about to move into the mobile sector according to a demonstration by Texas Instruments in Amsterdam.

New technology will allow people to record a television show onto a mobile phone and watch it at a later date. Apparently picture in picture capabilities will also be included so you can watch two shows at once on the train to work.

PVR technology will be found in some high end phones by 2007 and we expect the main manufacturers pushing TV phones at the moment will be interested in adding a video recording facility.

With TV on mobiles struggling to take off maybe more features and usability is needed to take the technology into the mainstream.

Telstra Tunes out of this Universe

Australian incumbent Telstra has reportedly cooled on the idea of launching a DVB-H network, after a 12-month trial with some other companies. Instead it’s looking at 3G-based video technology MBMS pushed by Ericsson, which is building out Telstra’s 3G network. The article is a bit confusing about which technology is better and/or cheaper, which I think accurately reflects the fact that nobody really knows. If DVB-H does launch it will require new spectrum, but the government has a couple of frequencies bands it plans to auction off for “new services”, so that shouldn’t be too much trouble.

Incidentally, a good place to check out the various mobile TV technologies is here.

Interactive Advertising with SMS/MMS

One of the features that ought to be a no-brainer for advertisers is to include an sms short code on all their advertisements. This means that people can see the ad and instantly fire off an sms with their ever-present mobile and get a response just as instantly. Examples might be to claim a coupon, find the nearest stockist, arrange a test-drive for a car and any number of other groovy marketing enhancements.

But at least 6 years after sms became mainstream, this feature is still far from common and what should surely be as automatic as putting a web address on an ad, still gets omitted.

One reason could be cost. While most people would think nothing of firing off an sms to get more info, the advertiser normally faces some cost from the service provider, along with a set up fee. And when the set up fee is amortised over the total response, the cost per response can be pretty hefty.

So it’s interesting that mobi.li have launched a totally free service for advertisers in the UK - the user pays the normal cost of the sms. So that means no set up or ongoing charges and really, removes any commercial rationale for not embracing sms interactivity. Their business model , if you’re curious, is to sign up customers and sell them other services in due course. A pretty common plan these days.

However, I suspect that one reason why agencies especially are reluctant to go down this route is that it introduces a frightening level of accountability. Currently, assessing advertising effectiveness is pretty woolly in most cases, involving measures like the number of people who could see an ad. If you start to prove how few people actually notice an advertisement and then engage with it via an interaction, it might begin to call into question the whole point of running a campaign in the first place.

Having personally experienced a meeting (a long time ago now) with a marketing director of a major brand where we both knew that his campaign had very few redemptions, there’s just no way of getting round the facts. Sure, you can fall back on mumbling about coverage, opportunities to see and other marketing-speak, but if no one felt inclined to respond to the offer and that’s 100% measurable, how can you persuade the guy to carry on using the channel?

However, in these days of increasing media accountability, with budgets migrating online and now to mobile, where payment by results is increasingly the norm, old media needs to fight back. If your poster, TV commercial or print ad isn’t engaging the consumer and isn’t generating a response, maybe it’s better to know that and identify what’s wrong with it, rather than pretending everything in the garden is rosy.

Pay per click (via a mobile) and pay per call is coming to old media as inevitably as England losing on penalties in Euro 2008. And that’s going to be another head-butt in the chest of an ad industry already dizzy with the pace of change and largely unable to understand that the world has drastically changed on them.

Virgin Mobile to launch First Mobile TV in UK?

ZD Net are reporting that the UK's Virgin Mobile are preparing to launch the UK's first true mobile broadcast service this autumn, utilizing British Telecom's Movio product. The Movio product makes use of the same digital spectrum as digital radio, but enhances the signal to included support for a limited number of TV channels.

Previous iterations of mobile TV in the UK, such as services provided by Orange and Vodafone, have streamed the signal as Internet Protocol (IP) packets. This method uses a large amount of 3G bandwidth and the resulting expense forced operators to cap the number of hours that users could watch per month.

Streaming mobile TV over 3G networks can also lead to a degraded service if there are many active users in the cell.

Insiders have told ZDNet UK that Virgin's deal with BT includes a period of exclusivity of three months. The content providers for Movio will likely be announced within a month.