The CTO of Motorola is an Indian woman. She tells us Motorola is #1 in video head ends, #1 in digital setup boxes, and a co-developer of HD. Forty years ago, Motorola actually SOLD TVs.
How cool! She says she has opinions and here they come, but her presentation is clearly corporate and rehearsed.
Content generation is changing from centrally- to user-generated, and distribution is changing from broadcast to unicast.
The cell phone is referred to as the “third screen.” After the laptop. The first screen is almost forgotten.
The big opportunities are in the mobilization, personalization, and socialization of content. We have to move content from one screen to another, one device to another, one time to another. Place shift, time shift, and greater participation.
Since 2004 Comcast has delivered 9 billion on-demand videos.
They add 60 new on-demand screens per second.
About half the households in the US have some kind of on-demand service, and 20% of houses have a DVR.
Coming soon: affordable wireless broadband (WiMax) will give us a mobile media platform.Motorola is trying to figure out how to build compelling devices without sacrificing battery life.(4 people born in the world every second, but 32 cell phones sold in the world every second. 2.7 billion cell phones are in use right now.)
Sales of mobile multimedia devices will go from 260 million now to 1.8 billion in 2009.
She shows us a glimpse of currently available technology: the Motorizer Z8 with smooth flicker free video playback, expandable storage, high quality resolution, powerful 3D graphics acceleration, world class connectivity. And the devices will only get better.
So what about the content for the personal theatre experience? Motorola partners with Universal Studios to get content to the devices. He thinks there’s both an opportunity for new types of content, and for porting over traditional long form content. There’s a lot of skepticism about whether people will watch full length movies on mobile phones, but if you can pause them, they might. Younger consumers are used to mobile devices anyway.
Once again, we depend on the future. We should pay more attention to our education system :-)
