Mobile 2.0 at Digital Holllywood

Mobile 2.0 at Digital Hollywood

Digital Hollywood started on Monday, May 4, and MobilizedTV covered a panel on “The Mobile Platform 2.0: Establishing the Personalized Video, Music and Communications Experience,” sponsored by MEF (Mobile Entertainment Forum) and moderated by Ted Cohen, managing partner at TAG Strategic with panelists Dan Schiappa, GM, mobile advertising experiences, platform, Microsoft; Edwin Aoki, technology fellow, AOL; Albert B. Chu, vp, marketing & alliances, ACCESS Systems America; Tom Ellsworth, CEO, GoTV; Matt Murphy, SVP, Digital Video Distribution, ESPN; Anthony Bontrager, president, 1Cast; and Tom Conrad, CTO, Pandora.

According to Schiappa, nobody is creating the “deep driven experience” necessary for successful mobile advertising. “You can’t just put a banner on a WAP site and think you’re doing it right,” he says. “We’re seeing rich media banner ads, but I’m thinking about a deep driven experience with coupons, search, mapping–all within the ad itself.”

Panelists agree that the application-driven experience—notably on iPhone but also Android—drives a more personalized experience. Bontrager notes that, although people bitch about ads, when faced with the choice of free content with ads or paid content, they still choose content with ads. Aoki says, however, that although the free edition has far more downloads, “we’re finding high uptake on the paid download. People who purchase the content are more passionate about the experience.”

With regard to the conversion from free to premium content, Tom Conrad reports that, after 5 or 6 yrs of trying and spending a lot of money to get subscribers, Rhapsody has half a million subscribers, or about half a percentage point. “We see conversion rates in the 1 to 5 percent range,” says Conrad. “I talked to other people with a premium model, so I think that’s a reasonable model. If you have a paid product, to think you’ll convert more than 5 percent is unrealistic.”

Mobile execs have to always look for the next thing. “Looking at the data gives you a short window of what people are doing today,” says Schiappa. “The mobile world moves very fast. It changed the minute the iPhone came out and forced other vendors to up their game. What’s the next wave of behavior? Data is good to have but will sometimes lead you in the wrong direction.”

Though the 3-screen model hasn’t yet blossomed, Ellsworth points out that seminal events are happening. “Look carefully at Direct TV and NFL and Netflix and Viacom. “The 3 screen experience won’t be watching the same thing on HD, mobile phone and web but what are the bits of experience that follow you around in the usage context.” Murphy notes the importance of AT&T and Verizon offering the Internet across the 3 screens.

What will drive consumer usage of the 3-screen model is another question. Conrad answered it by saying that the killer app, so to speak, might be how to solve on-demand for the large video catalogue across all providers. “Having the entire catalogue of video content in my living room and the mobile phone might be very compelling,” he says.

Murphy says that people will pay for convenience and they‘ll pay for the best possible screen (at the time). “I love taking my daughter to hockey practice but after 50 of them, I’m glad I have a screen available to me to watch something else on,” he says. “I think that’s the key.” Cohen relates that he watched the World Cup on a mobile phone at a family wedding. “If I had a large screen, I’d have watched it on that,” he says. “But at this wedding, the mobile phone screen was good enough.”

Conrad described DECE, a digital entertainment content consortium attempting to set new standards for the transfer and storage of copyrighted digital content. “That’s the opportunity,” says Conrad. “If the rights holders get their act together, they can avoid the trap the music industry fell into: I can’t get the last episode of Lost, I guess I’ll go to Bit Torrent. But thank god for NBC.com. So there are a lot fewer (pirated versions) making the rounds.”

To a question as to whether the panelists considered non-handset mobile devices, including Kindle and Nintendo DS, important to their markets, the answer was a resounding yes. “We’ll license APIs to put content in any number of mobile settings,” says Conrad. “There’s no category where people aren’t thinking about being network-connected. We have people coming to us asking for APIs who are making refrigerators. Everyone is doing it.”

Location-based technology is also hugely important in mobile plans. For Bontrager, his company’s focus on news content makes location-based tech crucial. “We include localized news content so if you’re from Seattle and going to Boston, we want to give you the option of getting news from home or where you’re going.” Schiappa notes that the ability to use location-based information is “one major differentiator for the mobile platform.” “In mobile advertising it’s huge,” he says. “To be able to do advertising so when you’re looking for restaurants, the ones near where you’re standing can advertise…this is catching fire across mobile and is important to advertisers.”

Conrad believes that location-based only works with a massive scale. “You need tens of millions of users to be interesting to the auto dealer in Springfield, IL,” he says. But Schiappa disagreed. “The more targeted they [the advertisers] get, the better,” he says. “The larger group you start with, the more people will fall into that audience. But if your audience is the right 200 people, they might be interested in you. Clearly there is a lot of value drilling down to the smaller audiences and people are willing to drill down to granularity.”

The panelists’ final comments touched on the importance of discoverability, focusing on making the user experience the most compelling possible and create acceptable standards and measurements. Chu described how mobile phones in Japan are used to scan for purchases. “Imagine that as an additional overlay on top of location,” he says. “All these new things will be coming. Whoever can come up with the best experience is key.” Aoki warned against hyper-personalization working against community building. “How do you create that serendipity of discovery but do it in a way you can still bring people together?” he says. Schiappa agrees. “We’ll start to see the Internet portions of the phone dominate and then you’ll have more experiences,” he says. “The experience is critical. The phone is the most personal device, and you have to be able to get those experiences right. Standardization via the Internet will help drive that.”

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