Content (Delivery) Is King for a Day

I hate to call IP service providers sheep, but they seem to be doing a lot of follow-me moves the technology industry is famous for lately.

If you recall a few weeks ago, a couple of major European service providers made strategic investments in expanding their Wi-Fi footprints ostensibly to prepare for the onslaught of video traffic to mobile devices with the ability to offload that traffic onto Wi-Fi networks.

Telefonica O2 said it will replace 450 hotspots on its own real estate it currently rents from The Cloud as the beginning of a massive public Wi-Fi network it plans to build in the U.K., offering free access to as many people in Blighty as it can manage. The next day IPTV and broadband provider BSkyB unveiled its plans to purchase The Cloud, which has a network of hotspots in bars, restaurants, hotels and the like in the U.K., Germany and Sweden.

Now content delivery has become the new flavor of the week, with two handset makers making back-to-back investments in companies also to help them to improve the delivery of video over mobile devices.

The investment arm of Nokia, Nokia Growth Partners, is giving Scandinavian service provider Voddler US$8 million to help it tweak its patented video-streaming technology specifically to deliver video on a range of devices, including handhelds, IP-based televisions and set-top boxes. Barely a minute later, HTC made a similar strategic investment of its own, buying London-based Saffron Digital – already an HTC partner – for about £30 million ($48 million). Saffron provides a variety of content-on-demand delivery services that are integrated into handsets; the company has a core focus in optimizing mobile video for both the iPhone and Android smartphone platforms.

Once again these moves point to the direction the mobile world is heading: a place where people’s consumption of video is no longer limited to a static device that sits in the corner of their living room, where the mobile devices they carry will become their own mini on-demand televisions.

The evolution to mobile video is still in its early stages, but experts say it will grow quickly, even before 4G networks – which will help improve video quality and reduce latency – are ubiquitous around the globe. Securing a way to improve video quality with more bandwidth – courtesy of Wi-Fi networks – and content-delivery optimization technology are two ways stakeholders can prepare to offer the best video services once demand increases.

Now the question is: Where will we see them investing next to prepare for the mobile video revolution?

I’m going to take an educated guess here and say network-optimization technology that mobile operators install on the back end to improve video quality through intelligent provisioning may be the next wave of investment. Or perhaps it will be intelligent offloading capability on the device end of the delivery chain. In this scenario, a mobile device will identify and know when to use a local Wi-Fi network to deliver video to improve its quality without any user interaction or even notifying the user that it’s doing so.

It’s up in the air (literally?) where mobile stakeholders will see fit to invest next to make mobile video a better experience for end users. But to be sure, it’s those users who will eventually reap the benefits of these strategic moves.