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Key to unlocking potential of Mobile Video Communications: Interoperability

Jeff Gordon, Chief Operating Officer, Syniverse 2/1/2011

People communicate and engage in new ways when they’re mobile.

They share pictures in real time, find goods and services on the go, access information and entertain themselves with their mobile devices. As technology advances, we’ve clearly seen mobile connectivity become less about voice and more about data, especially as 4G networks unfold with superfast transmission speeds. To put the data explosion in perspective, at Syniverse we processed enough data in 2010 to fill the U.S. Library of Congress 115 times.

So what’s next?

I envision mobile video communications driving the mobile transformation further, becoming a core offering for mobile operators just as text messaging has over the past decade. By 2014, nearly 66 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video, according to predictions by Cisco in its 2010 Visual

Networking Index Global Mobile Data Forecast.

Video communications humanize mobile interaction, allowing people to exchange not only information, but also personal moments. With video, the world becomes smaller and connections become deeper, making new things possible in commerce by adding new depth to a familiar communications channel.

Video has been around for years, but it has yet to take off in the mobile space as a viable communication tool. To achieve proliferation—and reach the $3.4 billion in revenue by 2015 that GigaOm Pro analysts estimate—seamless interoperability must be achieved.

Today’s video solutions don’t talk across platforms or devices, which means today people can’t have a true live video call unless they’re using the same smart phones, applications and operators. For example, some subscribers use the Skype application from their PCs, while others have Droid devices with video capabilities from the app store, and still others use iPhones—but they can’t connect across those platforms.

Mobile video communications will spread universally only when bridges are built to link all the isolated islands of networks, devices and people without limitation. With the right interoperability services, operators and applications providers alike can connect more subscribers and more devices, leading to seamless, transparent mobile video communications.

A Model to Follow

For a successful interoperability model, consider how SMS and MMS started and what happened once bridges were built from network to network, device to device, application to application.With interoperability, the subscriber of Operator A easily can text his friend on Operator B, C or D without a second thought.

“Once the walls came down, the text volumes started increasing,” said mobile industry analyst Iain Gillott, president of the research and consulting firm iGR, which found in a recent Syniverse-commissioned study that 71 percent of consumers name the smart phone as the best device for video chats. “The people who had started texting early then went kind of nuts. They started sending texts to everybody. Most people then started sending texts once they had received one. They went, ‘Oh, that’s what it looks like! Great, I’ll hit reply.’”

Whether referring to messaging or the latest mobile video communications technologies, closed, proprietary models quite simply can’t compete with open environments. End users yearn to cruise the open mobile road, traveling seamlessly across technology bridges—and an interoperating mobile video experience helps them push the accelerator to the floor.

If the industry makes mobile video follow the SMS and MMS models, it will become the next sticky service.

There’s an appetite for sending high-quality streaming video to any device, anywhere—without requiring any special technology. In fact, nearly one of every five subscribers (19 percent) in the United States has used either a cell phone or the Internet for video calling—and many of those have done both, according to iGR research. Only three months following the release of the first smart phones with front-facing cameras, 13 percent of users (3 percent of all consumers) had used P2P video on mobile phones—an illustration of pent-up demand.

“You need that initial kick start of someone seeing what the service is, which is how texting got going,” said Gillott, who found that 77 percent of those currently communicating via video are doing it from home, along with big swaths of people that also are using it from work and school.

“The same thing can happen with mobile video communications,” he said. “Consumers will use it more if there is interoperability between operators, applications and devices—there’s absolutely no question. People want to use it on their computers and then they’ll also want to use it on their smart phones.”

With access to ubiquitous mobile video communications, consumers won’t be able to get enough—whether they’re business people connecting to corporate boardrooms or moms broadcasting kids’ football games in real time to geographically distant grandparents. In this new frontier, many companies, from established operators to start-up applications providers readily can stake their claims with unique, branded services.

Push A Button and It Works

When it comes to any type of mobile technology, there’s one common theme for consumers: They expect it to work.

It all comes down to the expedient nature of mobile: Turn your device on; push a button; and it works. Once disparate video islands are connected, two forces will drive market uptake: massive consumer demand for video and the fundamental value proposition that mobile is fast and easy.

In the successful mobile video communications world, bridges will abound, enabling people to do more than see eye-to-eye. They’ll video chat with each other iPhone to Droid, BlackBerry to laptop, and all the combinations in between, making the world a little bit smaller and the human connection a little bit closer.