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The Way Forward:
Interactive Mobile Media Services
White Paper
Cheng Wu
June 2008
© 2008 Azuki Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Background
The wide deployment of broadband wireless networks and smart hand held devices, coupled with the
advent of Web 2.0 services and the proliferation of digitized content have combined to create a
revolution in how future content, services and information will be created, shared and distributed. The
rapid technological advancements in mobile handsets, along with their relatively low prices and resulting
huge volumes make them likely to become the truly universal “personal computing device”, leaping past
the desktop era of the last decades.
Despite this, many challenges remain for mobile based broadband services before they become
mainstream. For one, unlike the desktop, mobile is highly fragmented by device level differences in
underlying cellular infrastructure, device capabilities, handset operating systems, content formats,
application APIs and varying user interfaces. These differences hinder development and deployment of
new mobile services and fragment the market. Traditional carrier control of service deployment and
content access has also slowed deployment of new interactive mobile media services. What exactly
defines interactive mobile media services? Interactive mobile media services are a new class of services
which enable consumers to more efficiently discover, experiences, interact with, and share the
information and entertainment media they like with friends and colleagues.
Concurrent with deployment hindrances, multimedia content proliferation and the advent of Web 2.0
services such as mashups and mobile widgets are pushing the bandwidth limit at the last “mobile mile”
to the extreme. A case in point, at 625 kbps, considered the sustainable date rate for CDMA EVDO rev A,
it takes 56 seconds to download a song, 26.2 minutes for a TV show and 6.2 hours for a movie. The
proliferation of smart mobile widgets will drive the traffic loads even higher as each widget may invoke
multiple active HTTP connections at the same time. The increased use of real time streaming to mobile
handsets also adds additional strain to the mobile infrastructure. Most importantly, because of the
sharing nature of today’s mobile infrastructure, variations in available bandwidth make it very difficult to
have a consistent mobile user experience, let alone QoS guarantees.
The physical constraints of mobile handsets also play an important role. In addition to communication
bandwidth, mobile devices are severely handicapped by device CPU power consumption and screen size.
Unfortunately, power consumption goes up as devices become more powerful or when they are
constantly connected to the Internet. The small screen size of mobile devices and limited textual input
abilities also necessitates a new mobile user experience and personalized view into content that eases
mobile information discovery, consumption and sharing. Most mobile media comes from desktops with
larger displays, high definition video and sophisticated multimedia presentation capabilities. This drives
the need for intelligent mobile content adaptation armed with dynamic codecs and intelligent rate
adaptation techniques in order to optimize the last mobile mile for rich media. This leads to the
conclusion that it is infeasible to simply make desktop oriented services available to mobile users at an
Internet scale unless the aforementioned constraints are addressed first.
It is important to first examine how mainstream mobile content services will be deployed and monetized
before we talk about how interactive mobile media services can be created. The content ecosystem has
continued to go through rapid changes in the past decade since the advent of Web 1.0. In addition to
2 © 2008 Azuki Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved June 2008
traditional subscription based premium content which is increasingly distributed online, user generated
content and syndicated content supported by free downloads now form the “outer content” distribution
layers in this new ecosystem. Supported almost entirely by advertising dollars, social networking portals
and search engines become the viral parts of the new content landscape providing sharable community
level information as well as serving as a gateway to paid content.
Simplify the Ecosystem for Mobile Content and Service Creation
Mobile content and service creation haven’t become mainstream markets yet, despite the fact that the
desktop content and services have continued to flourish at a rapid pace. Consumer research studies
have shown that only 5‐10% of mobile users have experimented with rich media on their phone. In
addition to a number of infrastructure and device related challenges as described above, the mobile
content ecosystem requires a major make‐over toward deployment simplicity.
Today’s mobile content ecosystem is severely fragmented, thus hindering content delivery and
monetization. Desktop content is still manually transformed and adapted for mobile consumption or
worse yet just re‐rendered from its native HTTP form onto the handset. WAP based HTTP servers are still
commonly deployed with severe scalability and bandwidth limitations. Tight coupling of vendor specific
media players and stream servers is still being strictly enforced, making it difficult to create a universal
mobile content player environment. Most importantly, over 85 % of mobile handsets installed
worldwide are less capable “feature phones” despite the rapid growth of smart phones in recent years.
These devices are largely un‐addressable because of their more limited capabilities and the inability for
the existing mobile infrastructure to adapt and deliver rich media to these lower end handsets.
It is important to note, however, that the content ecosystem itself is going through some significant
paradigm shifts. The advent of social networking web sites has sparked a tremendous growth in
user‐generated content and user based communities for syndicated content. Traditional content
providers and web brands have been quick to recognize the market potential of viral distribution and
building mobile audiences and have accelerated their own direct to consumer strategies. What has
become increasingly clear is that user generated content, syndicated content, and traditional
subscription based premium content are being integrated into a multi‐tiered ecosystem with user
generated content at the edge, supported largely by online advertising revenue. There is a pressing need
to develop the ability to reach mobile users ubiquitously, smart and feature phones all included, with a
flexible ad insertion model creating a wealth of ad inventory over a simplified content delivery
infrastructure.
3 © 2008 Azuki Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved June 2008
Intelligent Delivery of Personalized Content: Media Mashup
From a service perspective, Web 2.0 means embedded intelligence in data streams that can be used in
real time for the purpose of achieving interactive content, dynamic ad insertion, targeted content
distribution, mashup of syndicated content, and data mining. Important and highly relevant information
is collected from these streams including user preferences, demographic data and usage often
obtainable in real time with information on interactivity.
Mobile handsets are in an enviable position when it comes to personalized services because these
devices are the place where user context is inherently available, ranging from user preference, user
identity, location data, presence and last but not least, the ability to author user generated content with
handset cameras, various device sensors, and the advent of mobile user communities.
In addition, the following technological trends will together help realize the vision of interactive mobile
media services:
• Presence and availability of local storage, built‐in or externally attached, on mobile handsets
makes it possible to create a virtualized stream environment for personalization where live
streams could be temporarily stored and replayed. In this virtual environment, users can not tell
if a stream is replayed from local storage or arrives over the network in real time. This is the
basis for time‐shifted services.
• With digitized multi‐media content comes metadata for data streams. Metadata forms the basis
for inserting service specific directives such as targeted ads, highly personalized content to drive
relevancy, location based services, as well as social, interactive capabilities. Digitized content
also makes it possible to personalize content on intelligent end points; in this context, metadata
serves to tag or label the content, making it possible for end points to perform personalization
based on user preferences or policies (both by explicit and implicit means).
4 © 2008 Azuki Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved June 2008
• Location, context, and content sensitive services are made possible through the inclusion of
various sensors, GPS location devices or even simple camera inputs. The inclusion of these
sensors makes it possible to apply intelligent filtering to receive data streams or to search for
more relevant context when a search is executed. For instance, the display of an in‐vehicle GPS
system can intelligently factor in traffic loads along a selected route and advise the driver
accordingly.
• Next generation mashup services on hand‐held devices are coming on line. These do not require
programming and they leave control in the hands of end users for the value of combining
disparate sources of content, social media and location services.
Last Mobile Mile Optimization
Most multimedia content can be delivered to end points on a time‐shifted basis. The term time‐shifted
refers to the ability to store real time content and services locally on mobile hand‐held devices before
playing back to compensate for either intermittent network availability or poor quality of service. In
addition to the obvious benefit of better content QoS, time‐shifted services can allow downloads to
occur during off‐peak hours in the network or be spread over a longer period of time even under
intermittent network connectivity, a critical consideration to fit into most cellular network
infrastructures well. Time‐shifted services imply that intelligent end points operate in a virtualized
stream environment,where locally replayed and delayed streams are indistinguishable from those
delivered through the network in real time.
While time‐shifting enables targeted service distribution based on metadata mining and end point
personalization, new social networking communities signal the beginning of pushing content ownership
into the hands of individual users and enable peer‐to‐peer interactive services and sharing of content. All
these demand that services be tailored based on user identity, preference, and location‐awareness
where location could simply be a logical entity such as a home or an office that serves as a content hint
or “context clue”.
SOA Enabled Mobile Content and Services
With recent advancements in SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and Web services, it is now possible to
create a simple mobile content delivery framework that is largely based on universally available browser
functionalities and native embedded media player capabilities. In this model, content is “prepared” for
the purpose of personalization and last mobile mile optimization in the Internet service cloud and
rendered to mobile handsets largely independent of the handset OS or resident device capabilities.
Furthermore, through stream virtualization, a range of mashup services can be enabled and vendor
specific (contextual) ads can be inserted based on pre‐established rules alongside mobile content
without a lengthy, often manual, content syndication process.
Azuki System Solutions
Focusing on the intersection of user context and content, Azuki Systems brings a new level of mobile
user experiences that is personalized and interactive. As mobile devices become more Internet
connected, mobile data access needs to be enhanced from casual, on‐demand information access to
5 © 2008 Azuki Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved June 2008
known Internet locations which is personalized such that only desirable information will be presented,
often pre‐filtered and sorted, before it reaches mobile users. In order to drive mainstream adoption of
mobile media, content navigation and relevancy to user tastes has to be improved. By making the
mobile user experience a seamless extension of desktop and Web 2.0 social network communities, Azuki
solutions harness existing social networking infrastructure by bridging mobile users to these services via
innovative mobile media discovery, orchestration and ease of consumption for mobile content.
The above vision is enabled by an innovative, patent pending software platform that bridges the
real‐time intersection of user context and content for mobile. The Azuki MashMedia Platform provides
everything content publishers and mobile operators need to create, differentiate, and monetize highly
personal, interactive rich media services. With the foundation of the platform providing dynamic
decomposition and assembly of contextual media, advertising and user socialization, Azuki is able
seamlessly align various backend content to the broadest reach of mobile device form‐factors, whether
delivered via time‐shifted streams or media downloads.
Selected highlights of the Azuki MashMedia Platform include:
• Off deck content discovery can be personalized by automatic retrieval of RSS feeds, content
provider CMS interfaces/catalogs, or specific long or short‐tailed web sites based on user
provided filters. Retrieved content is indexed based on user filters and content headers. This
allows an organized presentation of user metadata and content headlines first before the next
level content is displayed.
• Real time Internet rich media with metadata can be filtered based on user playlists or filters and
consumed as a personalized content channel.
• Streams of various types can be synchronized and combined together based on time of events
and shared based on logical communities that bridge across multiple physical Web 2.0
communities (including merging social activity streams from disparate 3rd party social networks
or micro‐blogging tools such as Twitter).
• User specific context such as location can be used for intelligent mashup services (video, audio,
photo, user‐generated comments and contextual advertising) assembled via the Azuki media
mashup engine.
• Multiple concurrent MP3 streams can be combined and personalized to create a new unique
audio stream.
• Metadata can be shared within an overlay community over existing social networking
communities or new content provider or web portal communities that foster socialization
around media.
Conclusion
With broadband wireless networks being built out in every part of the world and more than 3 billion
worldwide handsets with ever‐increasing capabilities being sold, the potential for interactive mobile
media services will dwarf the growth in PC Internet services of the last 10 years. However, platform
incompatibilities, mobile device limitations, wireless network differences, and the variable nature of
mobile wireless bandwidth present unique and difficult challenges that are not present in the desktop
6 © 2008 Azuki Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved June 2008
PC environment. Azuki’s software platform, with its innovative media mashup engine at the core,
addresses these challenges, and allows the rapid creation of personalized, high‐quality, interactive
mobile media services that will be highly engaging for consumers and profitable for content publishers
and mobile operators.
7 © 2008 Azuki Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved June 2008