Streaming's Role in Mobile Media

There has been a lot of exciting announcements for mobile media this week surrounding the CTIA conference.

A very cool announcement that took place about a month ago, has finally come to fruition. The popular slingplayer media streamer has landed in the mobile phone market, and promises to provide a very interesting case study into how consumers react to the ability to stream conent from their home tv, to their phone.

In a nutshell, the SlingPlayer Mobile for Palm OS will allow users with a palm enabled phone to stream live television from their home tv, to their mobile phone. While this system only works on palm phones, the results from this beta could reveal some interesting information about how people consume media on the run.

Now this service sounds great on paper, but I am skeptical of many things surrounding this kind of technology. Streaming technology is far from being perfected, and I still have trouble and problems while streaming content from a high speed internet access point on my home computer. So to think that this service being utilized on a mobile phone network kind of worries me. I can just imagine the crappy picture quality and constantly interrupted feeds, which would probably provide for a very negative viewing experience.'

However, setting aside bandwidth inefficiencies for the moment, I think this is the future of mobile media. I believe, as I have mentioned in previous blogs, that streaming content from home sources to mobile devices, removes some of the storage limitations that mobile products have to deal with, and also makes people's content available anywhere on any device.

Ultimately, I believe this is what people crave. Constant access on any device to all of their owned media content. Now, this is very idealistic, considering DRM's role in all of this mobile media mess, but if either more interoperability is created between DRM or if it is completely abolished, mobile media markets could flourish and become truly valued sources of entertainment.