@ Open Mobile Summit: America’s pastime, congested networks and live video

SAN FRANCISCO — “Everything’s going mobile,” Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB.com, said during a keynote panel here at the Open Mobile Summit.
Bowman was direct and rather forthcoming on a panel sitting between Nokia Siemens Networks CTO Hossein Moiin and Verizon Wireless CTO Anthony Melone.
In 2010, 37% of all of the site’s traffic was accessed via mobile, he said. Next year, he expects it to comprise the majority of MLB.com’s traffic.
“We’re living in a world where people are consuming content on smaller screens,” Bowman said. “It’s clear that people are going to compartmentalize” their viewing behavior more than they did a few years ago.
As is the case with most apps, pricing continues to be an issue that the site wrestles with. MLB.com currently has a free and premium product, but “we’re not sure by the way that we’re pricing it right,” Bowman said.
He added that even if MLB.com dropped the price by 50%, he isn’t sure sales would double. But one thing’s for sure in his mind: “We don’t believe high-end quality content should be free.”
Speaking of price, Nokia Siemens Networks’ Moiin thinks the current scheme that carriers have implemented for data packages are not clear to consumers and that a smarter approach should be taken on network congestion.
“When the network is empty, perhaps we can charge very little for downloading of large files. When the network is busy, perhaps we can charge more,” he said. “The technology will provide and has provided the right enablers” to allow carriers to do that.
But “you can’t solve it on the backs of consumers,” Melone said, later adding: “we don’t want customers thinking about ‘can i use this app now?'”
It all comes down to video. As Bowman noted: “The network eater is live video.”
Video on mobile devices is already here to stay, Melone said. The question is “How will the ecosystem evolve to make that efficient for everyone?” he said.
“If anybody thinks that the wireless environment will replace the wired environment for high-definition TV, that’s not going to happen.”
Moiin noted that LTE has the technical capability for multicast and broadcast video, which makes streaming video much more manageable on the networks.
Verizon’s Melone didn’t get into specifics, but said the largest U.S. carrier is “working with all of our infrastructure providers … to develop technology to incorporate a broadcast capability. To invoke that you have to allocate a portion of your spectrum.”
He added: “It’s a balance but we do believe that would be a solution to this problem down the road” and a method to “more efficiently deal with live content.”
Moiin and Melone were also dragged into an inevitable discussion about the definition of 4G.
“4G is well defined by ITU,” Moiin said. “None of the technologies that we’re talking about today satisfy that requirement… 3G will continue to exist even if you go into LTE as far at ITU is concerned.”
As far as branding new technologies goes, Melone said: “We’ll all do what we need to do to advance our own interests… “We’ll let customers decide if it’s a transformational experience or not.”
When asked about the future role that carriers will have with MLB.com, Bowman made it clear that carriers have to remain as involved as ever. Carriers are the most logical partners for the site because they’re enabling the content delivery and pricing programs its business relies on.
“We came to the dance with them so we’re going to stay at the dance with them as long as we can… If the carrier is left on the sideline, it’s not going to work,” he said.
“We’re going to fail as often as they,” Bowman continued. “The last thing we want to do is attack Verizon or AT&T.”