Producing Participatory Media
Week 6 - March 4

Topics:

  • Mobile Phone Video Capture
  • Mobile Phone Video Streaming


  • Mobile Phone Video Capture

    Mobile phones and camera phones are gaining ubiquity. Although the quality has a little ways to go, we can take advantage of the built-in network connectivity to utilize them as either a production tool or an audience interaction tool. SMS is a given, already being used in mass-media to allow small amounts of interactivity in shows like American Idol (voting). Picture mail or MMS is starting to hit the big time as well, at least on the internet. Following in its footsteps is video.

    Most video capabile phones capture video in a highly compressed offshoot of MPEG-4 called 3GP. Fortunately, most of the players that support MPEG-4 (QuickTime, Real and many others) also support 3GP so it is easy for us to integrate into what we are doing.

    Unfortunately, MMS messages are a step behind SMS. The connections between carriers are not completely established so phone to phone MMS messages are still difficult as is sending MMS messages from a computer or something that is not on the mobile phone network. The one portion of this, the part that is most useful to us in utlizing video from phones, delivery of MMS messages via email is pretty standard and easy to take advantage of.

    I built a sample application in Perl that reads email from a specific email account and automatically saves any attached video file such as those sent to my email box from my phone. Furthermore, this application automatically posts these video files to my blog in the style of video blog postings. Of course there is much more that can be done with these video files so think of the blog posting as an example.

    An Example Post
    The Perl Application
    What are these little video posts all about?

    More Information:
  • Apple - MPEG-4 - 3GPP
  • 3GPP - Standards Organization




  • Mobile Phone Video Streaming

    Of course, along with the ability to shoot video on mobile phones comes the ability to watch video on mobile phones. Broadcasters, content providers and mobile network providers love this. It uses up bandwidth, it can utilize micropayments for content and it provides a new and interesting venue for content outside of the home.

    For our purposes, what the broadcasters and the mobile providers are doing isn't so interesting (but if you are interested there is a lot of information to be found in the links below) what is interesting is that we can stream to mobile phones as well. Both the RealServer and the QuickTime streaming servers support streaming of video to the phones utilizing the 3GP video format.

    The streaming is easy: For QuickTime you need to "hint" the file just like any other streaming content. Real has a Mobile Producer that can be used for both live and on-demand production.

    The hard part is getting the content to the mobile phone user. Like the RealGuide, we could create a set of WML or HTML pages that are developed for display on the phone or even easier we can send links via SMS.

    More Informattion:
  • RealPlayer for Mobile
  • Real Guide Mobile
  • Mobile version of the Real Guide for Series 60
  • The Sound Cell Bells
  • Cell phones channel TV broadcasts
  • Verizon VCast
  • MobiTV
  • Streaming to 2.5/3G Cell Phones
  • Streaming Media to Mobile Audiences
  • PacketVideo
  • RealNetworks: Create Mobile Media
  • Encoding Specs for Mobile Devices