Attention mobile video entrepreneurs: One of the top executives at leading venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers is eager to find a mobile video company that offers “truly mobile video,” and he hasn’t seen it yet.
“We need to think what is mobile about video,” said Cyriac Roeding, entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture fund, during a panel session on mobile video at MacWorld in San Francisco earlier this month. “We need to come up with a completely new experience on mobile phones that breaks the notion of just extending what we already know and see. We need to make it truly mobile and I haven’t seen that yet.”
The opportunity exists to integrate the mobile phone with traditional TV, possibly using the cell phone as an interface to the TV set, he said. “But it won’t look like it looks today.”
He urged mobile video developers to think beyond simply offering existing shows on mobile phones, though there is a market for that. Think about what makes the platform unique, Roeding said.
“Is it a small TV screen? A small Internet screen? I don’t think it’s either one of the two. It’s a new medium in its own right and anyone who does not see it that way and just tries to emulate what we already know is missing out on 80% of the opportunity. This is the most social of media. You bought it to be social. You’re talking to people, you’re texting people. It’s personal. The ideal scenario is to combine entertainment and personalization,” he said.
The mobile phone experience also needs to be priced better to entice more consumers to shoot, upload and send videos to friends from a mobile phone, said Kelly Liang, senior director of business development at YouTube, on the panel.
“There is a gap in the marketplace where you don’t have a way to seamlessly record a video using your phone and share and upload and not have to incur a lot of expensive fees to send the video to your friends,” she said. “The price is often overlooked but consumer affordability drives adoption.”
The mobile video session at MacWorld was produced in partnership with the National Association of Television Program Executives.
Daisy Whitney is a is a reporter for TV Week, a sister publication to RCR Wireless News. Both publications are owned by Crain Communications Inc.
