Mobile Television: The Emergence of a Personal-Mass Media Platform

Television through your mobile phone.  Sounds interesting.  However, the way it currently exists might be more of a headache than an actual convenience.  You get television streamed directly to your mobile phone and you watch it whenever you have free time during the day. If you’re a commuter who spends 3 hours in the metro in New York City, mobile TV can be a godsend, but if you spend the majority of your time in LA traffic like I do, it can be pretty useless.

Currently a very small number of people use mobile TV in the United States.  When comparing it to countries like South Korea, where 1 in 7 people are active Mobile TV users, we are pretty behind in the times.  However, looking at the United States as a whole, we are not a country who is big on public transportation.  Therefore, the things we need on a mobile platform are inherently different. 

Also in some ways, current mobile TV is going against the current trends in television.  People want to watch television on their own schedule… so what good is to have a mobile TV if all you get is commercials? or for that matter, that boring early afternoon programming?  By the time all the good shows come on, the majority of the people are already home.  If these mobile TV companies could come up with some kind of on demand system, where you get to pick what shows your mobile phone gets, that would definitely be worth looking at.

Overall, it doesn’t seem that mobile TV is going to catch up in the US any time soon.  If the companies want to reach an audience past the 20-something year old techie, they will have to come up with innovative programming that will surpass anything we have currently seen. 

Twitter coverage

Blogger Amy Gahran recorded thoughts and events at the Total Community Coverage in Cyberspace seminar live using Twitter. Click here to read her record.

One person’s take from all this

If you don’t adapt to your community’s diverse needs and don’t present interesting, engaging and essential content using all the tools the Web has to offer, you can kiss your readership goodbye. 

Reading into some things

As it turns out, many journalists don’t even read their own publications. Note to general public - don’t do this. 

Journalists not reading??

I know exactly what Cory Haik means when she says no one is reading the paper.  I had a subscription to the Los Angeles Times but found I couldn’t get all the way through it on a daily basis.  I now go on-line.  Is this a poor substitution?  As Robert Hopwood points out, part of the job of a multimedia journalist is to ensure the on-line product is as informative as what we find in print.  It shouldn’t be looked at as a substitution but as THE product.  Somehow though, I still find myself missing my subscription to the Los Angeles Times.  Is that wrong? And if journalists aren’t reading?  Why do we expect our readers to? 

ESL features on news websites

To further Amy Gahran’s point on providing simplified english text on news websites, check out the BBC’s “Learn English” section. 

What about the content?

Cory Haik from the Seattle Times brings up a good point.  With all the new fancy tools cropping up are we losing sight of what we are really doing?  Are websites loaded with options just a cover-up for flimsy content?  Are we helping reporters not want to invest the time, energy and single mindedness that is needed to produce a quality story? 

Latino for a year

I really liked Ron Gonzales’ idea of producing a year long multimedia project on what it’s like to be a Latino living in California. As Gonzalez pointed out, Latinos are increasingly joining the middle class.  Yet, no one is writing about this upward movement.  What’s it like to be someone who has worked hard to establish yourself in the states, is a responsible citizen but still carries with you cultural and perhaps, language barriers?  I think readers would be as interested in this kind of project as the gang and immigration stories more regularly published.  The series could also help change the perception of Hispanics.  And isn’t that what journalism is all about?

Asian American audiences

Cory Haik’s presentation on targeting the Asian population in Seattle reminded me of EastWest magazine, a hip Asian American publication. 

UGC

Call me crazy, but do people really like reading user generated content? I mean, sometimes the random outlandish comment is kind of funny, but how much is too much? 

Usability as an Issue to getting Info to users/readers

Many presenters have talked about having content that is not viewed, accessed, commented on, etc. Perhaps the issue is web usability and the structure/architecture of the site in presenting information.

Lots of questions about how to present and segment content on site(s) or new sites to reach different audiences. Some of these questions may require looking at web usability issues.

SEO Compliance

Samaruddin Stewart made an excellent point regarding search engine optimization for news organizations. Many people today find their news online via search engines. If a news site and its photos are well optimized, it will have a much greater presence among news readers who use search engines to find their news.

Generation Gap

I think a news organization must decide which generation of Spanish speakers it wants to attract before implementing Spanish language features. I would think the only demographic who would actually be interested in bilingual features, rather than Spanish-only, are the younger folks who were raised amongst two cultures and aren’t as set in their ways as much as the older folks. 

A question regarding target audiences

I think all the ideas presented so far are really fantastic and forward thinking. The presentations also apply a lot of what was discussed in previous workshops during the seminar.

My question is how can a website move ahead with these features without first asking members of the target audience if they would even be interested in them?

Bilingual Television

It doesn’t feature news programming, but LATV is a national bilingual cable channel worth looking at.