True Convergence – MobiTV’s Take on the TV Everywhere Promise

We’re excited to be at the center of some fairly significant shifts in how users interact with television content. MobiTV has invested years in building upon the promise of anytime, anywhere, any screen content – and with buzzwords and business models abounding in 2011, we thought we’d take a moment to articulate how we look at “convergence” – i.e. the converging of screens and content centered around you, the consumer. In fact, even that definition should provide you with a fairly strong idea of how we’ve built our converged media platform, and for whom. It’s certainly not limited to allowing you to watch your media within the confines of your house.

One of our favorite concepts is “From mobile to multi-screen”. We spent the better part of the past decade solving one of the trickiest challenges in content delivery, which was the mobile part. Solving for myriad device types, carrier networks, operating systems, wireless network standards and so on has been our stock in trade, and we think the results speak for themselves. We’re now powering the carrier-branded TV experiences for 3 of the 4 leading US wireless providers, as well as the NFL Mobile product on Verizon Wireless. We get mobile, and it is our heritage – yet consumers are increasingly demanding seamless and fast access to TV content everywhere they happen to be, not simply on the phone in their pocket. So we’ve extended our platform to allow for that same content to be watched, in a consistent & visually-compelling user experience, on tablets, PCs and even on the home TV.

We believe true convergence means those consumers can take their home TV experience with them out into the world, and then take their mobile TV experience with them back into the home. Content – be it live TV, full-episode on-demand TV, or downloadable shows that can be watched anywhere – should be centered around the user’s preferences for where and how they like to watch. It should be optimized for each viewing screen, so that mobile TV looks beautiful and crisp on mobile and fits user expectations for a small screen, and that same TV content viewed at home fits our heightened expectations for big-screen viewing as well. We love the idea of allowing bookmarks, favorites and user access control across all of the many screens in your life – so that you can truly personalize your experience and have it carry over across those screens.

We don’t think true convergence simply involves extending your home cable TV service to a tablet, and then ensuring you can’t leave the confines of your house in order to watch it. Moreover, we believe that consumers want to watch TV solely on their terms, and that the ability to place-shift and time-shift for all types of content needs to extend everywhere the user wants to go - even on airplanes or out at sea, where they haven’t installed 3G/4G networks (yet). Our converged media platform was built and designed to deliver on our vision of true convergence in a highly scalable, cost-effective, device-independent and reliable way, and we’re continuing to extend it where users want to watch.