I never owned a Sony Watchman. Somehow the idea of carting around Tom Brokaw, Jane Pauley or Johnny Carson on my wrist seemed less fun than unwinding with them on the couch. I like to watch in the privacy of my home.
Nowadays, of course, privacy means looking passers-by in the eye while revealing personal thoughts into a microphone attached to an earpiece, in a conversation taking place alone together in public.
And instead of the Watchman’s matchbox-sized TV screen, today’s technophiles carry amazingly sharp color screens smaller than a deck of cards. This deck is stacked with options including Internet access, cameras (still and video), MP3 players and games. The uber-gadget sometimes goes by its old name, the cellphone.
Soon, if marketers have their way, we’ll think of it as “cellevision.”
The modest cellphone has morphed into a portable entertainment and business center. It wants to take over the jobs of your PC, your iPod and your Blackberry too. Voice mail is out; video-clip messages are in.
We may not need them any more than we needed a Watchman, but I wouldn’t mind checking out David Letterman’s top-10 list on the go, watching cable news from the doctor’s waiting room, or catching a music video while waiting for a call. I might even watch Verizon’s “24: Conspiracy,” a TV drama delivered via cellphone in a 60-second “V-Cast.”
So what could be on your phone now or in the near future?
Wireless carriers Verizon, Sprint and Cingular offer varied menus of clips and highlights.
MobiTV, shared by Cingular and Sprint, touts more than 25 channels, delivering some live TV feeds to subscribers in real time including MSNBC and ABC News, and sports and comedy channels on a made-for-cell feed. Frame rates can be jerky with older phones, but newer phones can display at a rate up to 15 frames per second.
Verizon’s on-demand videocasts are available in 30 markets. (Denver will be added to the list before the 2005 holiday selling season begins. The video-capable phones are “selling well in Denver even though the videocast is not here yet,” according to Robert Kelley of Verison Wireless.)
Caveat emptor: on-demand video via cellphone is unlike live, real-time TV streaming. Pre-selected bits of content like music videos or Letterman’s top 10 are made available by outlets experimenting with the format.
Not for everybody
Depending on your age and stage, you will either embrace or loathe the snippet concept. The packagers have evidence that younger users appreciate the edited service: A highlight clip of the winner of the Daytona 500, available immediately after the race, was a hit; so was the Grammy after-party clip, complete with fashion disasters.
As the cellphone evolves into an omni-living handset, you can expect your cellphone bill to inflate accordingly. Expect to pay about $15 a month, on top of your regular wireless phone service, and buy a phone that goes for about $200 after a rebate. Then you can join the cell-as-everything revolution. That includes the $5 a month you would have paid the wireless carrier for mobile Internet access alone.
That’s a lot of money, considering the content is essentially promotional material. But for commuters with time to kill or early adopters who can’t wait for the latest gizmo, it’s a kick. The quality of the onscreen product is surprisingly good: the images at 15-18 frames per second on the Verizon phone (compared with 30 per second on TV) looks terrific and the phone is only about 4 ounces.
VH1, Comedy Central, CNN and the NBA are putting out highlights for video cellphone users. Disney’s ABC News, ESPN and SoapNet are also available on Verizon’s V-Cast.
Verizon’s Kelley noted the V-cast content from CNN, for instance, could be updated as many as 300 times a day.
The music industry has embraced cellevision as a way to tease new albums. Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound” was introduced as a 30-second sampler for cellphones two months before showing up in stores.
Experimental medium
TV producers and filmmakers see the mobile market as ripe for experimentation. A Los Angeles-based company called Fun Little Movies, which debuted on Sprint PCS this year, uses struggling soap actors and has-beens (Gary Coleman has a mini-show) in short-short pieces.
The made-for-mobile soaps, kidvid and comedy currently on cellphones won’t win acting awards, but they are a step beyond ring tones.
More networks are expected to join in, repackaging content for cellevision the way they do for airline in-flight screenings. Naturally, commercials and product placements are getting into the act. A company called Third Screen Media (mobile phone screens are third, right behind TV and computers) sells ads to national clients who want their products on cellphones.
The business world believes consumers are going to want the next digital accessory. In its current issue, Forbes magazine reports: “Silicon Valley is gushy and giddy over this new era of ‘cellevision,’ a welcome respite from five years of financial rubble since the Net bubble burst.”
Tech savvy Dennis Haarsager, associate vice president at Washington State University and general manager of public TV and radio stations there, said, “phones are evolving into portable IP devices, so anything you can do on the Internet is fair game for these devices – scaled down, of course.”
In Haarsager’s view, “media that respects how people use their time these days has a future. Think of them as ‘stolen moments’ devices or as video iPods.”
Money in the niches
For media organizations, the rise of mobile media will mean a new goal. Instead of making their fortunes from the rare megahit, they will cash in on many, many tiny niche markets.
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, writes, “Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.”
There will always be money to be made on the big Nielsen hits, the “CSI” or “Desperate Housewives” of the moment, just as there will be a market for mass-appeal book retailers like Barnes & Noble. But there’s another vein of gold in the mobile media market, just as there’s a huge market for Amazon.com, which makes more than half its sales in less popular titles.
Clearly, cellevision is not a replacement for the living-room TV set, but an adjunct.
While the Sony Watchman was a real-time device, cellevision is on-demand. And on-demand is growing as viewers get comfortable deciding what to watch, when and where.
If the industry prognosticators are right, “where” is increasingly going to be on a cellphone.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
