Next Generation Wireless Applications: Creating Mobile Applications in a Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 World, 2nd Edition

15.5 MOBILISATION OPTIONS

What are the options for mobilising the media experience? The options are becoming increasingly diverse. They can be categorised in terms of distinct technological approaches in the same way that physical media distribution is limited by the available media formats, like DVD and VHS. The mobile clearly imposes constraints on the user interface, such as small screens and limited processing power, so the options for mobilisation are still largely constrained by technology. Take Mobile TV for example. Some handsets can support the data rates necessary to stream live video, whilst others can't. However, those that can't might still be able to play offline video files with reasonable resolution via an MMC card; hence, we can divide the possibilities here into online versus offline and so on. This is just one example of categorisation based on handset capabilities. Let's look at the most prevalent options.

Figure 15.2 Generic media content use cases.

Figure 15.3 shows a simplified map of how we can get content into the hands of users. Mostly we are concerned here with the ‘downstreaming’ of content from the producers to the users, not the other way around, which we shall discuss later. The first foray into mobile is often constrained to one of the downstream routes before getting in to more innovative solutions. However, some of the technologies used for downstreaming ...