Re: 1.2 feedback: Streaming

On Friday 22 November 2002 7:38 pm, Jim Ley wrote:
|  "Vadim Plessky" <plessky@cnt.ru> wrote in message
|  news:200211221856.08327.plessky@cnt.ru...
|
|  > On Friday 22 November 2002 1:08 am, John Hayman wrote:
|  > I was studing PDA market (which has much bigger screen than mobile
|  phone), and
|  > found that browsing web with PDA is not a very convinient task.
|  > And that's what people were telling me, so it's not only my experience.
|  >
|  > I also interviewed several top managers - "how do you perceive getting
|  > Internet/web content via mobile phone", and "what applications for
|  mobile
|  > phone you are interested in"
|  > And do you know what was the answer?
|  > "I use mobile phone to make calls, period."
|
|  Was that asked in global marketplace or some regional one, I can't be
|  bothered to dig through PPT files or the audio (maybe I should index
|  showcaster content better), 

No, it hasn't been something like IDC or DataQuest research, I was doing it on 
my own, and not for publication/reselling.
Speaking about geography:  it was conducted here, in Russia, and results are 
applicable to Russia and CIS.  I would guess that you can extend those 
results to most of Eastern-European countries, too.

It can be that those markets are not very interesting for you.
But that are the markets I am working at ;-)

| but a recent conference I attended was
|  suggesting that data revenues were 20 or 30% of ARPU IIRC.  Certainly SMS
|  usage for a lot of people in the UK and IT is more important than the
|  call.

Well, I would believe that SMS is *used widely*, but can you compare it to, 
say, number of e-mails circulating around?
I think ration would be 100:1 (100 mails per one SMS written)

Anyway, SMS is *stone age* comparing to SVG.
It took us about 20 years (from 1980 to 2000) to get WYSIWYG word processing, 
scalable fonts, basic graphics, etc. (I am speaking about set of typical 
features available, for example, in MS Office 2000)
And 20 years ago we had just pure ASCII text, alpha-numeric terminals with 
"built-in" fonts, without all those nifty features offered by modern PC/Mac 
Desktop.

|
|  Certainly accessing websites via mobile phones is only 3% of mobile phone
|  consumers in FR, DE, UK, (but then accessing the internet at all is <50%
|  of mobile phone owners) emails are 5%, sms games is 15%, travel
|  information 4% *, there's lots of data use on mobile phones, the lack of
|  existing use has a lot to do with poor usability, not a lack of desire.

Or it depends on level of your auditory.
It's known that just 5% of total population can be *managers*.
All other people (95%) just can't be on management positions.

So, the fact that 3% of consumers use mobile phones for e-mails speaks about  
nothing.
It can be that market is completly sturated, and there is no reason to built 
up new phones with e-mail support, as people who need e-mail in mobile 
phones, already have such phones :-)

Also: I wouldn't trust to reports/figures from Gartner or IDC.
They show in their reports what vendors/manufacturers *want to see*.
And usually they have no clue *what* exactly would happen with marekts in the 
future.
Have some of them predicted NASDAQ collapse? No.
So, quality of their reports speaks for theirself.

|
|  Then of course we look into Japan and South Korea etc. where data
|  services make up an even larger proportion of their revenues, and include
|  web use, and a lot of it.  Yes it's regional but don't assume your
|  regional mobile use reflects world wide use.

Market in S.Korea and Japan is *very different* form US or Europe.
Can you just imagine that S.Korea has 8 million ADSL lines?
And Taiwan (with 22 mil. population) has 4 mil. of ADSL lines installed?

With ADSL (around 6.8Mbit/1Mbit async) , or VDSL (15Mbit synchronous) or cable 
modem *in place*, you shouldn't worry about compression or streaming format.
You have enough boradband capacity to feed almost any kind of traffic/content.

|
|  One of the problems for content providers is the cost of delivery, here
|  in the UK a text SMS will cost ~3.5p to deliver (interconnect rate is 3p
|  so that's bare minimum) but an MMS is many, many times that, this is of
|  course motivating WAP, you don't browse with WAP, what you do is recieve
|  a text SMS, which provides a WAP link, it keeps the cost down, WAP
|  browsing may be dead, WAP protocol isn't.
|
|  Of course I'm also pessimistic for SVG on mobile in the short term, I've
|  seen Real streaming video to a handset (well actually not streaming but a
|  demo) and I've seen java, but I've yet to see any SVG content interest,
|  but that's because we've not got the handsets yet.

I think SVG has a much better future in TV sets/video recorders/DVD players.

Current UI in those devices is terrible.
I wish there were open-source DVD players or TVs out there, so that I could 
try to embed my SVG icons into that equipemnt, and enjoy nice graphics 
instead of ugly lines...

|
|  > |  But it needs
|  > |  - ubiquity (there are more than a few would-be implementers of
|  SVG-Mobile
|  > | out there) - fast download (well, we'll see)
|  > |  - compelling content (animations are **KEY**)
|
|  I don't agree that animations are a compelling content in the mobile
|  sphere, but I also don't believe SVG has much benefit in the mobile
|  sphere if it's static, the bandwidth savings aren't great - if any, all
|  you get is the size independance, and CC/PP (or similar old) provide
|  enough to tailor specific rasters for each device.

Well, about bandwidth savings - they do exist, and savings are quite huge.
Of course, saving also depends on kind of browser/supported compression 
protocols, and power of CPU in your device.
For example, my SVG icon them is about 3.8MB in pre-rendered pixmap format 
(and there is no way to build into PDA such huge amount of data), but just 
around 300K zipped, or just 70K .tar.bzip'ed.
I doubt though that mobile phones or WIndows CE (Pocket PC) PDAs would support 
.tar.bz2 ;-))

|
|  Jim.
|
|  * figures from GartnerG2.

-- 
Best Regards,

Vadim Plessky
SVG Icons
http://svgicons.sourceforge.net

Received on Friday, 22 November 2002 12:32:23 UTC