Television on the go: Anytime, anywhere!

I remember when people used to make fun of the gizmo trends for mobile phone and asked sarcastic questions like: What can your phone do? Now with the iPhone (and more generally with all smartphones) the question without irony is: What can’t you do?

Mobile phones are like Swiss knifes or nano laptops, they enable you to do an increasing number of things. But the lastest advancement which has impressed me the most has been the development of television and real-time television available for smartphones.

The program Television for iPhone was one of the first applications to offer television content (from channel programs) accessible from your mobile phone. But what’s really impressive is BBC’s launch of real-time content available via smartphones or the France24 application for the iPhone.

This TV-on-the-go idea could at some point influence the way TV is made. The emphasis could be put on short content (3/4 minute content) but of course this will depend on technological improvements (which could solve the current problems such as the extension of the 3G network).

What is the next step? Well, it’s already here: broadcasting live from your smartphone. Companies like Qik, UstreamTV or Flixwagon already offer this kind of service. The next trend will be the integration of real-time content into social media. Qik, for example, is a mobile utility that offers to integrate your videos into your Facebook profile (but you cannot broadcast live on Facebook…yet). That could potentially turn everyone into a journalist, with both positive (reporting abuses, sharing unique moments) and negative (privacy issues) consequences.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Mobile Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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