iPhone is changing viewing habits    
Written by Chris Forrester  
Sunday, 14 March 2010 10:44
For the past few years there has been an assumption that broadcasters would adapt and re-format some transmissions to fit smaller cell-phone screens. It hasn’t happened, and a Rapid TV News Round Table says it isn’t going to happen because of the impact the iPhone has had on consumers.

A Rapid TV News’ panel of experts says the debate on whether to adapt programming for small cellular screen is over and dead. “It’s actually all changed because of the iPhone and it’s not a debate anymore,” says Bob Gentry, a partner at Marquis Consulting, and a well-respected name in the industry. “You can perfectly watch broadcast content straight through your iPhone now, and you don’t need to resize the image in order to enjoy it. I think that whole paradigm which was talked about that you’re going to shoot for mobile and so forth has sort of dissipated away.”

Mark Goodburn, EchoStar Europe’s director/marketing and communications, agreed, saying smart phone screens are simply bigger. “You’re seeing people watching and consuming television, and video-based media, on things like iPods and iPhones. The screens have actually got bigger. I think the other thing is, in [EchoStar-owned] Sling Media’s terms, some of the research we have done shows that people use [smart phones] for watching a lot of sports content. That’s come out in statistics.”

Luke Kennedy, Vision IPTV’s product & sales director, says that Apple did a simply “brilliant job” in lining up all the variable factors to make its product a success. “[They] dictated to the networks how it’s going to operate in order to deliver a compelling product. The iPhone’s success has been in integrating the whole ecosystem of cost, network, data and packages in order to allow the consumers to get on and do what they want to do which is actually consume the content.”

Read the complete discussion by clicking [here]

© Rapid TV News 2010