This is not the vidcasting I discussed last week, but it’s certainly a nod in the right direction and with content positioned for a target I suggested would be an easy one to reach… parents.
On the French Riviera last week, television executives from around the world crowded into a mobile television seminar to gaze at a giant screen view of the late Ray Charles serenading Ernie of Sesame Street from the frame of a mobile phone.
J. Paul Marcum, Sesame Street’s general manager for its interactive group, came to the annual MIPTV international television conference in Cannes as part of a vanguard of producers to trade information about a format so new that no one is sure how business models will evolve.
Sesame Street, he said, is one of the first children’s entertainment companies to start offering phone fare, through an alliance struck in March with Verizon in the United States to offer some of its classics through a $15-a-month wireless broadband service called V Cast.
“It’s certainly not like we’re advocating selling phones to preschoolers,” Mr. Marcum said. “But you can’t ignore the convenience factor when people are in motion. A parent can pass back a telephone to the kids in the back of the car. And it’s a device that families are going to carry with them everywhere.” [NYT]
I can’t speak to the quality of the VCast service having no experience with it as a Cingular customer, but my wife got a Sesame Street demo from one of the doormen in our building who has the service and she noted how compelling it was.
Cingular does offer MobiTV, but of course not for the Treo… or my wife’s new phone so I guess we won’t be sampling this first-hand anytime soon. For us, it’s actually easier and quicker to create either segments or full programs and movies from our digitized library. The immediacy and reliability of content saved locally is a key point missed my offering streaming only access… especially since the networks are still being deployed – even if I can hear you now, there might not be EV-DO service handy. Queue time can be killer when you need something like this and what if it skips or even worse you run out of range…
Vidcasting is really the way to go. I can easily carry several episodes or movies on an SD card and hand a Palm device (hmmm… actually I have quite a few laying around) running The Core Media Player or even a PSP. Of course now the trick becomes do I really want my child handling my gadgets? The cheap portable DVD player we have seems more likely to sustain the abuse, though prices will continue to drop on Palm and other multimedia capable units.
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