There’s an audience, but is there a business model?
Can made-for-mobile video ever stand on its own two feet, or will it always be a showcase for film makers who want to graduate to ‘proper’ media like TV and cinema? Tim Green ponders…
If you’ve been in the mobile content biz since the beginning, you’ll know that discussing the mobile video sector is a little like music fans talking about Britpop. It’s, like, so four hype-cycles ago.
And yet, as so often is the case, just when the hype turns to indifference a genuine market starts to develop. [...] use the evidence of your eyes. People are watching video on their iPhones, Toccos and Viewtys. [...]
“You need a big brand and big talent to get distribution now. But how do you pay for it? Advertisers want results especially in today’s climate, so it’s hard to get sponsorship,” Goodwin adds.
It doesn’t help that so many producers are unrealistic about the technical and fiscal realities of the medium. “I got approaches all the time,” recalls Goodwin. “But most producers had no idea about basic things like pixellation and aspect ratios. Many weren’t interested in a revenue share and expected to make a fortune, which was never realistically going to happen.”
[...] a small devoted audience – and a number of channels on which to reach it – does exist. This presents a sliver of opportunity to well-established, talented film makers. MTV, for example, has run a successful mobile unit since 2006 and developed original titles such as Meet Or Delete and TR3s. Over 100 million clips were viewed in 2008.
MTV has its own distribution, which helps. Fun Little Movies, on the other hand, has been delighting us with genuinely funny mobile series like Love Bytes and Turbo Dates since 2005 with no network of its own. Instead, it relies on Sprint TV, Verizon, MTV, Comedy Central and others for visibility.
For founder Frank Chindamo, himself a screenwriter, the medium is all about the script. “Mobile is a writer’s medium,” he says. “It all depends on the writing. You could make a film on a phone and it would work if the script is right.”
Having said that, production values do count. Turbo Dates was lit and acted beautifully and co-written by Shrek writer Terry Rossio [and created, co-written, and directed by Harvard Lampoon alum Jocelyn Stamat]. Small wonder the episode ‘English As A Second Language’ won the Mofilm Grand Prize at Mobile World Congress earlier this year.
This kind of work illustrates that the medium can work artistically. And there are many festivals around the world – Denmark’s Dogma Mobile, Canada’s Mobifest, Holland’s Viva La Focus, Brazil’s Festival Do Minuto – showcasing the talent of amateur mobile film makers. One example is Mobile Postcard series by Peter Vadocz, which makes a movie of thousands of still pictures taken on a Nokia N95. [...]