How to make iPhone video delivery the core of your mobile marketing strategy

September 8, 2009

Martin Hayward is director of marketing at Mirror Image Internet

By Martin Hayward

There’s no doubt the consumption of mobile video continues to skyrocket.

Nielsen’s Three Screen Report from last quarter shows that teens are watching about 6.5 hours of video on a mobile phone per month, while adults (18-24 years old) are taking in nearly three hours of mobile video per month.

With these types of viewing numbers, reports estimate that mobile video will be worth $11 billion by 2011 and one of the fastest growing mobile entertainment sectors.

With numbers like these, marketers cannot and have not been ignoring the tremendous opportunity to get more content on their customers/audiences mobile handsets.

And while in theory this is a no-brainier, content owners and brands are actually running into a number of technology and content delivery roadblocks along the way.

From bandwidth issues and the intricacies of streaming vs. on-demand video to the increasing diversity of handsets among a brand’s audience create significant challenges for marketers to strike while the iron is hot.

One of the greatest opportunities for content providers is to repurpose their video content for the iPhone.

With over 5.2 million devices sold in the first quarter of 2009 alone, the handsets are video magnets and are quickly becoming the marketer’s primary target in terms of grabbing consumers’ attention with relevant content.

But let’s take a step back and look at some specific challenges associated with delivering video to the iPhone. 

The fact is, in many cases, marketers need to look no further for answers than their content delivery network (CDN) for the mobile video support they need. Here are a few considerations for content owners to think about before making iPhone video delivery a central piece of their mobile video marketing strategy.

Video assets – VOD and live
The first question to ask should be: do I have an existing library of videos? If you do, it’s not necessary to encode the video in multiple formats or bit rates - a huge storage and resource saver.

A CDN will allow you to point an H.264 AAC video to the CDN. They have the streaming servers that support multi-protocol streaming:  RTMP for Flash, HTTP to the iPhone, Microsoft Silverlight Smooth Streaming, RTSP/RTP for QuickTime and MPEG-TS for IPTV set-top boxes, all from a single media source. Sound like alphabet soup?

Bottom line, any H.264 video and AAC audio from your Web content library can play a part in your mobile video strategy without any special processing.

Secondly, if you’re planning a live event and deliver it to the iPhone, you will need an encoder to encode the stream in an H.264 AAC format.

A variety of encoder manufacturers have products that will encode H.264 video.

It sounds painful, but with the right CDN guiding you it’s actually not.

Consult with your IT staff and make sure you have the proper tools in place. This way you can maximize real-time opportunities to reach customers with live, streaming content. 

It’s not as hard as you think…
…but go in with your eyes open. There are hidden challenges with delivering live and on-demand video content to devices such as the iPhone.

But a CDN with a video management platform and a reliable network can deliver your VOD or live stream with surprising ease. The complexity has been removed and simplified; just point, stream, and deliver.

Martin Hayward is director of marketing at Mirror Image Internet, Tewksbury, MA. Reach him at  .