Comment: Mobile TV has potential to become the new Walkman

It is not just the broadsheets who have been covering mobile TV(MTV). The tabloids are also enchanted with the prospect of getting television on your phone. Such interest can not be put down to good marketing by suppliers. There is something about MTV that entrances people.

MTV changes the nature of TV and the character of mobile telephony. It has the potential to become a cultural phenomenon in the tradition of the Walkman and the iPod; products that change the way we do things.

It will change mobile telephony because it is a move from communication to media provision. And in media, content is king. This could, in turn, strengthen the hand of the network operators at the expense of the handset manufacturers.

But MTV can only exist with a technical infrastructure and interconnection between content providers, operators and hard and software manufacturers.

From the user's perspective, MTV requires not just usability but also good screen resolution, decent coverage and perhaps most importantly quality programmes.

In addition, trust and reputation are factors in a communication world -- what MTV does is to crystallise the concept of engagement as a quality measure of products and services, including branding of course.

This raises some interesting questions for everyone involved.  Questions such as: Will MTV drive out old content providers and spawn new ones that deliver to a mobile market? What content will work best on mobiles? And will MTV spur the creation of new types of content?

One possibility is location-based services, for example streaming programming relevant to a certain place.

Another likely development would be more prosaic content, like watching goals and the latest soaps in mobile format as they happen, and the further opening up of broadcasting to include user-produced content.

It is also easy to imagine MTV swamped with spam and advertising.

There are also questions about whether consumers will even be engaged by MTV, let alone develop an ongoing relationship with content providers and all the other partners on the network.

Of course, there are parallels here with the web. Engaging content requires reliability, utility and possibly novelty. So we can expect to see reliable providers of premium content like the BBC capitalise on MTV, but also offerings of content sharing and production (ie, Napster TV) and new utilities (ie, Google TV).

In the longer run, MTV can be seen as part of the technologies that began with Super 8 and led to Digital Video. Thus we can expect new content and new producers, perhaps DogmeMTV?

With a wider potential audience, it may be more important than mobile gaming, and it's not always easy to predict which products and services are engagable. For example, few predicted the potential of SMS to engage, or the iPod or the Walkman for that matter.

Catering for sophisticated users, the ones with the cash for MTV, rests on engagement. I may be wrong, but MTV users will be quite demanding and will want to engage with content that is enriching and transformational and possibly fun.

Jon Knight is a director at User-Lab, a not-for-profit research centre based at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design that carries out commercial and academic research projects in user-centred design.

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