What you should know about mobile video delivery
- January 14th, 2010
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Devices
Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android… Your audience may be coming to you on any one of these devices. So how do you decide which device to produce content for? It’s not easy. Fortunately with every new generation of mobile device, more and more standards are set. There is almost 1 certainty now, all of these devices will play a 3GP or MP4 formatted video.
Not all devices are equal however. Each one of these phones has a different resolution screen and runs on different provider networks. Although, all the major cell providers now support 3G in most parts of the country, 3G is not readily available. Also, 3G speeds vary from provider to provider and from location to location. You can not count on your audience being able to support a 768Kbps stream. Also some mobile users will be watching on a WiFi connected device which means they could support higher bit rates.
So what do you do then? There are some packages out there which will supply device detection and then you can redirect the request to an appropriately formatted version of the video. There are some hardware devices out there which will encode the video on the fly (Ripcode) this could allow you to have one high quality version and then re-encode it as needed. You could also just build for the lowest common denominator and hope for the best.
What ever method you choose, you need to remember that to get a high quality video you don’t need a very high bit rate since you are watching this on a small screen.
Delivery Apps
Some companies are designing specifically for the iPhone since statistics show that 80% of all mobile Internet usage comes from the iPhone. Obviously YouTube was right out of the gates with a special iPhone app. There are some other iPhone apps lilke mDialog which caters to Indi and foreign films. If wouldn’t take much to write an iPhone app which basically browses a database of avilable videos and then plays them through the iPhone video player/QuickTime player. This is a simple and elegant solution. It can brand your content and keep visitors coming back for more.
You could also write an app specific for the BlackBerry and Android (G1) and feel confident that you’ve got you bases covered. Also since your visitors will be using an app specific to a device you can direct them to a specially formatted version of the video for that device.
Normal Website Video Delivery
So you don’t have the resources to develop a device specific app? That’s ok. You can build a webpage specifically for mobile devices, you can even get a .mobi domain if you want. The trick here will be to format your video to support the largest range of devices or ask your visitors to choose a link for their device. As I mentioned before you can also use device detection software to figure out what kind of device is visiting you page.
How to encode and format my videos
As we discussed 3GP and MP4 are the widest supported formats amongst mobile devices. So choose a format you’re comfortable with and start encoding! Use this table to help you gauge screen resolutions
- iPhone 480×320
- Blackberry Storm 480×320
- Blackberry Bold 480×320
- Blackberry Curve 480×360
- Blackberry Perl Flip 240×320
- TMobile G1 – 480×320
- Samsung Jack 320×240
- Palm Trio pro 320×320
- HTC Touch Pro 480×640
- Palm Pre 320×480
The worst thing that will happen if you produce a video in the wrong resolution is the image may become distorted when displayed on the phone. It won’t be the end of the world, but if it’s paid content you will probably have to insure that the right video is being delivered for the right phone, so choose wisely.
Streaming vs Progressive Download
Chances are you don’t have a Darwin Streaming Server or a Flash Media Server at your disposal. A CDN or specialized service will have access to this type of server. You could certainly install your own, but make sure you have the bandwidth to deliver to a mass audience. Be careful considering Flash as delivery method today. There is limited Flash support on phones, most don’t support it, including the iPhone! If you stream via Flash Media Server then you must have a Flash player, you can not point a browser to a .FLV and .F4V file and expect it to play. Your best option for streaming today is to use a Darwin (QuickTime) streaming server, it can stream 3GP and MP4 files as well as MOV files. You need to be careful about streaming higher bit rate videos to a mobile device. If you get a device on an Edge, 2G network, or older PCS network then it may not be able to support more than 256Kbps or so. Only a true 3G connection and good one at that would be able to support a 768kbps or higher bit rate.
So you should consider a progressive download delivery instead. This way no matter what connection the end user has, the video can be delivered. But consider this, a 50MB video delivered at 256Kbps will take approximately 27 minutes to download, will your audience stay that long? I would recommend using a well connected CDN to deliver your mobile content to ensure that the file gets to the device as quickly as possible.
For more information on the differences between HTTP Progressive download and Streaming click here
Conclusion
I hope this short briefing is enough to encourage you to start pushing out mobile content. Since mobile devices are simply a wireless computer and since mobile browsers are getting better and better you don’t need to worry too much about how to deliver a video. You just need to ensure your content is in the right format and bit rate to allow maximum exposure.
If you have any questions about this topic, please feel free to post them here and I will respond.
Thanks,
Mike Colburn (DigitalMediaGuy)