I don’t know whether to think recent calculations for mobile video consumption (or lack thereof) via the four top wireless carriers in America are just a little bit Halloween spooky, a big point of concern, or perhaps a good omen.
It’s come to be a common refrain that most of the country’s residents are mobile phone users. But what they do with their devices is, particularly in media consumption, very unlike the advanced markets of Asia and places elsewhere. Less than 3% of American subscribers bother to consume on-demand video in any form. “Woe is US?”
That number, released by Comscore yesterday, is certainly not an attractive one for any carrier to next to its name, especially given the activities made possible by new(ish) strides in mobile broadband penetration across the country by various networks. Whether it is a 4.4% usership that AT&T managed to serve circa June-August 2008, the 4.2% tallied for Sprint, or the the 2.4% figures each given to T-Mobile and Verizon, none shine very brightly.
To get specific for a moment, so-called amateur video clips (a la YouTube) ranked #1 among those who did use the carrier’s video services, followed by music videos, comedy clips, and film trailers. Each segment managed to net over 1 million users. (Alternatively, Web browsing, email transfers, and photo and video sharing are all working double-digit percentiles themselves, totaling over 100,000,000 users.)
What’s more, present platforms used to deliver streaming and on-demand video to handsets (only few of which manage to interface with online services really well) should really be taken for what they are: mobile broadband and Internet use. It’s entirely reasonable to think, then, that consumers wish to consider mobile broadband and Internet use very much the same way they do their land-based residential and at-work broadband connections. Which is to say, “give me access for a fee and let me do what I want to do and see what I want to see.”
Wireless carriers of course don’t appreciate this sensibility very much, since it essentially designates their task as a dumb ISP, so to speak. No value added. Just build the towers, sell the handsets and monthly connections and allow the user to do what the user wants to do from there on out. (How very libertarian and Ron Paul-like of the user. And we all know how wigs in the major parties regard independent thinkers.)