Multimedia Anywhere
I love this topic since as you know, I own the "manywhere.com" domain, which has been looking for a raison d'etre for a few years now. Today looks like the moment where there is honest-to-goodness critical mass in the mobile media world. Between the announcements at CES, 3GSM and DEMO, we've seen a megaton of movement in this area in a really short time. But those that say 2005 is the year of mobile music, aren't getting the big picture. It's all about multimedia anywhere.
I'm not sure if I have the energy to apply critical analysis to all of the announcements, I just wanted to point out a few of them stress the idea that mobile media is on a roll. We've seen streaming services like MobiTV and VCast and now Motorola's iRadio, we've seen personal content streaming and storage services like Orb.com, Avvenu, and XDrive, we've seen manufacturers like Nokia announce support for different codecs like OMA and WMA and Motorola's iTunes phone, and we've seen a host of announcements for various new music and media stores like Napster To Go, MSN video and Sony's Connect. And who knows what's out on the horizon, and totally discounting the stuff that's already happening in Japan (hint: check out that KDDI link I pointed to yesterday).
This of course brings me back to Podcasting, which some people still think I'm down on which is not true. I'm down on the dedicated music player, I think PodCasting - or really, time shifted personal broadcasting on mobile devices - is going to continue to grow into a phenomenon. The other day I was stuck in Friday night traffic, reached for my Shuffle and happily listened to a week old Adam Curry podcast I hadn't gotten around to yet and thought once again, "there's really something to this!" To me the key will be when you can get that stuff on demand. If I had the know-how right now, I'd drop everything and start creating automatic conversion tools online for every phone that can play media files out there and start a streaming media company tomorrow dedicated to user generated content. I think it's going to be that big.
It all goes back to the adage, "Content is King", especially with 24/7 broadband connected multimedia capable micro computers (that we call mobile phone) in all our pockets.
-Russ