Man has, for
almost a decade, been depending on an ingenious invention known as the laptop.
This is one device which doesn’t disappoint us at work and leisure. It serves
us with Excel sheets and PowerPoint at work and movies, games and the World
Wide Web for entertainment.
The
entertainment screens, in the past few years have ‘grown’ from a 70mm screen in
the theatre to a screen as big as your TV set. However, the current trends
suggest that the screen sizes have further ‘grown’ to a mere 4 to 10 inches!
This growth of-course is not to be taken literally. What I am referring to is
the increase in penetration. A classic illustration of the rate at which the
Apples and Samsungs of the world have created place in our lives is the fact
that the cell phone penetration in US is a whopping 96%. To put things into
perspective here, the TV penetration in US saw a drop from 97% and equals the
cell phone penetration at 96%.
To sum it up,
work or no work, a screen in some form or the other solves our needs and as it
seems, today, all of it converges into the screen of a cell phone sitting in
our pockets. It has now become a source of entertainment and to a large extent,
a device which simplifies office work. With this amount of penetration, the
market to create or convert multimedia into cell-phone ready formats seems
enormous.
What makes the
industry even more lucrative is the fact that the existing players in the
market have fragmented efforts at making content mobile ready.
Aptara, a US
based digital media innovation company offers several solutions to convert source
content from any format and transforming it for distribution through mobile.
PowerMeMobile, a Dubai based company, enables users to capture and convert
anything on the computer screen into a mobile compatible format and push the
content to the user’s phone. Their unique proprietary infrastructure helps the
user to capture things like videos, wallpapers, documents and any part of the
song and send it OTA on to the hand held
device.
Recently, a lot
of media houses in India and abroad have realized the importance of converting
their existing media into mobile ready content. Netflix, a leading movie
renting company rolled out an app for iOS and Android, allowing their members
to stream mobile optimized movies and videos directly from their hand held
devices. Indian production houses have gone a step ahead and created content
purely for cell phones. Rajshri Productions have made 90 episodes of a humorous
serial, each episode being of not more than 3mins. On the other hand, Shemaroo
released a 3D CGI animation film ‘Super K’ for mobile viewing. They have also
tied-up with BSNL to show specially edited movies like Don and Ishqiya, termed
as ‘Mini Movies’ which are 15 minutes version of a movie, edited smartly and
comes with popular songs, important scenes and dialogues along with a narrator.
The collection of movies covers different genres and languages.
With smart phone
penetration increasing by the day and data traffic on wireless networks in US seeing
a jump of 110% in the last six months of 2010 to 226.5 billion megabytes
re-iterate the willingness of the consumer to view content on cell phones.
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