Streaming on the Go

Too often streaming media is considered a medium in and of itself rather than the enabling technology that it is. Streaming technology allows for the creation of new media channels; it’s a means for transporting data, nothing more and nothing less. A primary example of this can be found in the mobile market, where a revolution in content delivery is taking place and a new medium is being established through the application of streaming technology.

"The mobile space probably holds the most potential of any definable marketplace that we’ve seen for any streaming activity," says Richard Bennett, president of SmartVideo, a provider of turnkey solutions for delivering content to mobile devices. Various research reports have estimated that the mobile market will top $20 billion by the end of the decade, and streaming is poised to be responsible for the lion’s share of content delivery to handheld devices.

But despite the obvious opportunities for generating revenue off of streaming, the mobile market is still a nascent one with plenty of wrinkles to iron out. From the wireless networks to the handheld devices to the content itself, much has yet to be defined as to how best deliver and monetize mobile streaming. What follows is an update on the status of some of these challenges, as well as a look at how the mobile market is establishing itself as a medium in its own right.

The Technology Challenges
There are a number of technological obstacles that mobile content providers must face, with arguably the most daunting of those being the fractured nature of handheld device OSes. "In the desktop environment, fortunately, there’s a limited selection of OSes that you have to support out there with a server and player technology," says Troy Snyder, CEO of Nine Systems, an aggregated content delivery network based in San Diego. "As you move to the handheld there are additional complexities because you have additional OSes." Mobile carriers are notorious for not only having different OSes, but then also making additional alterations to them, creating a seemingly endless number of offshoots and derivations. "For one device you could have lots of different OSes, and you’ve got to create servers to handle all of those," Snyder continues.

This problem is exacerbated even further by the rapid evolution of handset technology. "We could take a guess at how many different handsets are out there, but we’d probably be a quarter or two behind when you look at this globally," says Snyder. "The heart of this complexity is the lack of standardization as far as software development for handhelds."