New York Times details MTV's wireless TV efforts
The Times discusses techniques MTV uses to produce the short (three minutes or less), often crude, cellular TV programs designed for MTV’s audience that’s the key market for wireless TV in general.
“For television veterans, the advance of cellphone television makes for competing anxieties. They're worried that they may be moving far too slowly, but they're anxious, too, that they could be moving in the wrong direction,” the article says.
“It's a feeling something like television's pioneers must have had, trying to create visual shows for a nation still huddled around the radio. But another, perhaps more apt, comparison is to the early years of the Internet, when so-called content providers pumped prodigious amounts of material and ideas onto the Web and hoped that the demand for it would follow.
“More often than not, it didn't.”
MTV’s programs
MTV says it's the world’s largest producer of mobile content and it wants to — needs to — figure out what its audience will watch on cellular. MTV’s research says more than 40 percent of its viewers have cellular phones with SMS capability.
That’s actually rather strange to me because I’d assume a much greater percentage, but perhaps these young viewers — or their parents — can’t afford phones with SMS.
Some types of existing TV shows have worked well for cellular. These include news, stand-up comedy and “talking heads” programs such as Jon Stewart’s. But many programs don’t work well if they are simply offered via cellular, and many subscribers want new shows that are produced specifically for cellular, the article notes.
First original MTV-cellular program
The company’s first cellular phone-only program is “Sway's Hip-Hop Owner's Manual” that discusses the terminology of rap music (see below).
“Calloway, one of MTV's most popular on-air personalities, was the show's host, interviewing rap stars and chatting with people on the streets of Los Angeles and Harlem, serving as a kind of dreadlocked detective on the trail of hip-hop clarity,” the article says.
“In some ways, the show followed a traditional television blueprint, but it tweaked the almost unnoticed vernacular with its revved-up speed and with the way Calloway worked so close to the camera, seeming to pop out of the cellphone screen.”
Mechanics of filming
Shooting videos for cellular phones is — no surprise — different than for a television and in some ways a lot more difficult. The Times says, “To be intelligible on screens sometimes smaller than 2 inches by 2 inches, most shots must be close-ups.
“Producers also have to limit zooming, panning and quick movement, which can blur because of slow streaming rates and because cellphones often deliver only 15 frames of video per second, compared with 30 frames per second on regular television.”
The article notes that companies are more interested in mobile TV in part because Apple Computer has sold more videos for its video-enabled iPods that many analysts thought. Fifteen million videos have been downloaded in six months since the service was offered.
Generating revenues
One challenge for content providers is the business model. In the United States, many cellular operators (such as Sprint) charge subscribers a flat fee for viewing a variety of challenges. Of course, many operators in the U.S. and abroad also charge per-program or per-video.
Greg Clayman, vice president of wireless strategy and operations for MTV Networks (who was an executive at UPOC), says although MTV began wireless television in part to promote its brand in this new medium, the company is making money. MTV has streamed 2.5 million videos during March 2006, an increase of 40 percent over February.
One question for MTV and other cellular phone content providers is whether subscribers will watch advertisements. For example, would you watch a 30–second commercial in the middle of a three-minute show? What if the show was free if you agreed to commercials?
The advertising question is relevant to other forms of cellular content, such as wireless podcasting. When I listen to Pod2Mob’s streaming podcasts over cellular, there are occasional (audio, of course) commercials.
MTV slop
I don’t watch MTV. I think the music and programs are junk. But that doesn’t matter, of course, because MTV is extremely successful and doesn’t cater to the audience in which I’d fit (old, smart and enjoying music where the performers aren’t one step away from a jail sentence!).
The Times notes that MTV’s TV programs increasingly focus on “money, celebrity and sex.” The guy who’s responsible for this, Dave Srulnick of MTV (who’s the focus of the article), “arguably ranks pretty high on the list of people you could blame for making television, over the last several years, a place that caters to ever-more vapid tastes, running after the hearts and wallets of America's free-spending youth.
“If his early experience with cellphone programming is telling Sirulnick anything right now, it's that these trends will become even more pronounced in mobile television.” In other words, the slop you see on MTV’s TV shows will be translated into cellular programs.
Creating slop
By changing the wording of cellular titles — to reflect the duller, cruder minds of its young audience — the shows became more popular.
The article exaplains, “For example, when the network began uploading cellphone clips of the new insult-takedown show ‘Yo Momma,’ and gave them titles like ‘Friday's ‘Yo Momma' Sneak Peak,’ the snippets did O.K., but not great. Then they changed the titles to ones like ‘Yo Momma Is So Nasty’ and ‘Yo Momma Is So Poor.’
“The clips were consistently among the most-viewed of MTV's mobile shows.”
Worse than MTV
While it might be hard to imagine shows for cellular that are worse than what’s envisoned by MTV (and there’s more in the Times), the article also discusses Heavy.com (see below) that makes MTV look “thought provoking.” That’s scary.
Heavy.com “is now creating and buying funny, strange, perverse, disturbing and sometimes inexplicable video” with more than five million viewers a month and advertising sales estimated at $15 million to $20 million this year.
“It's not the kind of stuff you'd expect to see on television, except maybe on late-night public-access cable: blurry homemade video; kung fu clips overlaid with funny, obscenity-laced dialogue; and machinima (video-game scenes transformed into a kind of narrative animation, again usually with lots of profanity),” the Times reports.
Kids create the content
Simon Assaad, Heavy.com’s 35–year-old co-founder, places a lot of emphasis on the viewers creating content, rather than using his judgment. Indeed, some of the videos on the company’s Web site makes fun of MTV and other network offerings.
His philosophy:
“We don't have to decide what the hit shows are. We don't have to spend millions of dollars to pilot something. We don't even have to create it.“Those guys investing millions of dollars every pilot season based on a gut reaction? I'm surprised any of them live past the age of 45. It's got to be nerve-shattering.
“For us, we spend 5 or 10 grand or $200, whatever it is, to buy something. We put the thing up on the site. We know a day later whether it's a success.
“If it's not, we move on."
Heavy.com has received $10 million in venture financing, and Verizon Wireless broadcasts its channel on V CAST. The press release says Heavy.com has “a viral reach of 65 million taste-challenged pop culture junkies.”
MTV’s response
MTV thinks that if any company understands the market for mobile TV, it’s MTV. One show they’re considering it “Puberty.”
The Times says “Puberty” features avatars of “acne, vomit, feces, urine, gas, small breasts and pubic hair.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but maybe when I was a kid, a long, long, long time ago, I might have found “Puberty” a, well, gas. (Even as a youth, though, I usually preferred classical music to rock.)
Whatever….
Okay, so maybe the only TV show I watched regularly was “West Wing,” and now that is history.
Okay, so maybe the brain-dead slop of Heavy.com and MTV will infect cellular TV. Most of regular TV is infected with the brain-dead slop of reality shows, soap operas and sporting events. (Indeed, cellular operators hope World Cup mobile videos will be a huge moneymaker for viewers who think watching guys run to and fro across a field trying to kick a ball into a net is anything more than the equivalent of watching paint dry.)
Still, I’m a believer in the business and value of mobile TV. While most analysts were skeptical, I was, at a minimum, cautiously optimistic. Slop sells.
Most of life is slop, but quality gets through. So it will be with TV over cellular — lots of junk but some shows worth watching. And it will be a very big business.
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