Nick Jones

Mobile video is one of those technologies which my heart tells me ought to be much more successful than it is. Pretty much every mobile can record video, and some of the newer ones sport wide screen, HD, image stabilisation, and soon we’ll get HDMI outputs too.

But despite the ubiquity of video I’m disappointed by how little it’s used either by business or by individuals (not that those are very clear distinctions any more). Lots of people record clips for Youtube or as a message to friends, but the mobile seems to have got stuck in a rut as a low quality video clip recorder. You seldom see corporate video conferences involving mobiles, services like Livestream and Kyte are a bit niche, twitter doesn’t seem to want to extend the concept to 10 second mobile video snippets. And cool ideas such as real-time cosmetic enhancement (a feature I desperately need) haven’t got far beyond the labs. But I feel mobile video has the potential to do a lot more. So what went wrong?

Part of the problem is that the average mobile still has some unexpectedly awful video features. I mentioned in a previous blog that I’ve been playing with a Nokia N97 which is one of the most advanced handsets you’ll see anywhere. It can take a great 5 Mpix still image, but some video features are a disappointment. It doesn’t seem to have image stabilisation, and digital zoom is jumpy, not smooth, and when zoomed in the image is very pixellated. I don’t understand this, video is only using 230K of those 5 megapixels, why can’t we have a decent digital zoom? And even though the N97 has autofocus and can take a close-up picture it struggles with close-up video. I must stress I’m only using Nokia as an example because I happen to be using one this week, other manufacturers are just as bad.

Mobile video also faces social challenges. Western society is obsessed by physical appearance and for most of us it’s easy to look OK on a photo, because we can erase or edit the disappointing ones. But it’s a lot harder to look good on a video, and editing them is a lot more effort than removing red-eye from a snapshot. Many years ago I asked my daughter if she wanted a phone that could do video calls and her response was – “but then I’d have to put on my make-up before I made a phone call”. The potential for mobile video conferencing will certainly be limited if it’s restricted to those people (of both sexes) who are either flawlessly made-up or have given up caring about their appearance. Which takes me back to my desire for cosmetic enhancement software on the handset.

And while we’re talking about inhibitors let’s not forget money. Even with MPEG4 and an EU capped rate of 1 EUR a megabyte people aren’t going to upload much video while they’re on vacation. If the choice is between buying another bottle of wine or a sending a video to your friends the wine will likely win. Even when you’re at home a typical “unlimited” data cap of a few Gb doesn’t look that generous when you start sending lots of video.

However, despite all these challenges I think mobile video has a lot of untapped potential, especially as a corporate collaboration and communication tool. Before that potential is unlocked handset manufacturers must pay more attention to making video work well, but I think this will happen if only because Moore’s law will provide them with the chips and processing power to do so.