Over recent years the web has seen the growth of so-called “
Web 2.0 on Mobile”
Web 2.0 services based around the concept of a two-way information flow, and the empowering of individuals to create and
publish their own content and information through blogs, wikis, video sharing, and social networking services. Video content is often central to these services,
Web 2.0 allowing the uploading and sharing of content generated by customers, along with the emergence of video advertising on the web.
Access
to video content from a wider range of devices including mobile phones,
set top boxes, and games consoles is the next logical step, but
providing these services with the best possible quality can be
problematic. Mobile devices generally have additional constraints
regarding the type of content they can support due to CPU, screen size,
and power limitations. In contrast to PCs where new codecs and media
players can be easily installed or embedded into web browsers, many
phones can support only a limited set of standardized codecs as the
decode and playback functions are coupled with hardware capabilities in
the phone in order to reduce power drain.
The obvious solution to this dilemma is to employ offline trans-coding solutions coupled with a
Web 2.0 content management platform
to convert the source content into a range of formats appropriate for
the mobile devices and network access speed used by customers.
For example, a large
video-sharing site may typically receive 10,000 new items each day. If this is
to be delivered in one of 15 different formats, depending upon the mobile
devices and network speeds to be supported, then this represents as much as 7,500
hours of trans-coded content that will require a significant server farm and
storage to process and retain as well as the necessary streaming platform to
deliver this content to the end devices. Typically, only a small percentage of
these output files are ever accessed by customers (research has shown around
5%), or many of the subscribers will access from only a small subset of mobile
device types, meaning that much of the effort consumed in trans-coding content
was in effect wasted.