Movidity Takes Unique Approach to Mobile Video Sharing
"There could be cases where people are working in the field, say fixing an F-18 fighter jet, for example, and they need more depth to the training material. So they want to be able to disseminate that video training content out to the field in a live or archived method where the user can interact with that training material."
Along with training another vertical market that movy.tv applies itself to is safety and security. "One could stream hundreds of live streams from video security cameras through movy.ty," says Lollo. "And with restricted access, you could actually see the feeds from those cameras over your cell phone and actually control those cameras (in terms of things like pan, tilt and zoom) with your cell phone no matter where you are."
The Technology
According to Lollo, Movidity's secret advantage is its technology in general and its super-efficient proprietary media format in specific. "What we've developed is a new media format that is specifically engineered for the wireless world and also a transmission system that is specific for the wireless world. When you are watching video on a cell phone through movy.tv, it looks like your cell phone is doing an occasional browsing of Web pages. That's because we use something called media objects rather than actual bit streaming, which is the traditional model for sending media over a network. And the media objects themselves look like sort of unintelligible web pages from the perspective of the network. And the way it works is that whenever the player on your cell phone asks for another media segment, the movy.tv backend actually starts bringing these media objects down and decodes them and then starts playing them on the mobile device."
This method is not streaming as we usually think of it. "It's not really a stream; it's not like constant bit streaming," Lollo says. "Media objects are more like blobs of data. We take video and audio and we turn it into these discrete objects of information, and a single object looks kind of like a formatted Web page of information. And so an hour's worth of video is made up of a whole bunch of these little formatted Web pages and our player goes and pulls those down from the Website and basically recreates the video and audio from the discrete Web pages. So it's kind of like downloading blobs of information and rebuilding on the fly."
A Content Popularity Contest
What kinds of content will become popular among mobile users? Well, at first anything will go, says Lollo. "I think there will be a novelty aspect to it in the beginning. People will want to just throw stuff up and see what it looks like and share it with their friends," he says. "There will be a ton of stuff that people will decide to upload that frankly won’t look good on a cell phone screen. Let's face it, not everything can go from a 46-inch screen to a 1-1/2 inch screen," Obvious favorites for mobile users will be news and sports. Directors are already doing "small screen cuts" of their films, Lollo says, and he's already had "a lot of inquiry from the adult industry." However, for a while at least, the content will run the gamut. "People will throw up anything you can shake a stick at," he says.
,br>Eventually, the line between content provides and content consumers may even blur. "At some juncture down the road we hope to make it possible for people to capture a live video on their cell phones and upload it directly to movy.tv and publish it where it can be made globally available," says Lollo. "This will be pretty powerful. It will be like having a mobile TV station in your pocket."
Ready to Launch
The current status of movy.tv is "almost ready for prime time." The service will not formally launch until January 15. During December, Movidity will be inviting a "select focus group of people to come and try out the system," according to Lollo. "There will be a select group of content providers and a select group of end users who will provide some level of beta testing for us, and it will give us the opportunity to show the media/press the capabilities of the system. It will be a sort of closed preview to allow people have a first look at it and kick the tires a bit. And it will give us a little more feedback so we can do some nip and tuck before we do the public launch in January."
Using phrases like "power to the people," Lollo explains that he thinks the key advantages of his technology platform are "transparency and global access." He says that when he was in Europe recently, he was able to "whip out" his cell phone and access live TV channels from his hometown of Toronto, Canada, while sitting in the train station in Milan. "So we have married transparency and global access with the concept of video sharing and are trying to give that out to the public," says Lollo. "And the reality is that there's going to be so many potential uses for this technology that we don’t actually know what people will eventually bend it to."