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| Big mobile potential, little uptake |
July 6, 2006 |
The director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology is en route to the airport when we kick off our interview. “You’re in permanent touch with the pulse of the world,” said Derrick de Kerckhove, referring to our cellphones. “We have never had a system that can bring together the history of human communication. I call it putting the world in your pocket.
“It’s a collapsing of all the history of language. It’s the collapsing of the spoken word, via the third screen,” he resumed shortly. “Internet, video, TV, radio, MP3s, music, faxes, searching the Web, radio…Think of any communication device we’ve invented—they’re all in the cellphone. The only thing is, the bloody thing doesn’t make coffee in the morning.”
No, but our mobiles can access Olympic medal alerts, NHL video clips and downloadable music tracks, and according to an IDC study, North American mobile gaming revenues will double over the next two years. Emerging high-speed wireless networks will allow data transfer at 10 times the previous speed.
And in other countries the phones do even more. Billboard advertisements send messages to phones offering downloadable videos. And in one European theatre house a production’s final act—does she go with him, or the other guy?—is determined by the way the audience votes on their mobile phones.
And the industry is certainly predicting a bright future. “We will start seeing devices and handsets that have higher and higher capabilities,” said Adel Bazerghi, vice-president of wireless technology development for Bell Canada. “We will use our devices not only to communicate and talk, but also for fun and entertainment.”
No doubt we will, but today Canada is almost at the bottom of the global heap: usage is low and we’re behind most of the world in uptake and innovation.
“Only Turkey is behind us,” said Jean-Guy Rens, CATAAlliance director for Quebec and the founder and president of ScienceTech Communications Inc. “We’re behind in cellular telephony, not to mention cellular data. This is the first time in the history of Canadian telecommunications. We have been the first all the time. Now we are 27th.”
Carmi Levy, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group in London, Ont., concurred. “We so lag the wireless market and we are so relatively unsophisticated in our use of next-generation services,” he said.
Voice only, thanks
The truth is, cellphones in Canada are really not used for much more than talking. “We buy cellphones with tons of memory, high-resolution cameras, features up the ying-yang and polyphonic sound. And then we use them to call our mother to tell her that we’ll be late for supper,” Levy said.
One reason for this is Canada’s traditional telecommunications success. Our landline infrastructure is cheap and works well, and building up new networks requires billions of dollars of investment in a geography that is vast and sparsely populated. Also, some critics argue CRTC regulations slow innovation.
One definable hot market is youth, said Trish Van Veen, a project manager with the youth marketing consultancy Youthography. Many youth these days carry two phones: one with cheap evening and weekend plans, the other for cheap text messaging during the day. “Youth are very pragmatic.”
Convincing customers
But of course, to some extent all consumers are pragmatic, and that causes some to question the basic mobile model.
Mobile music downloads, for example, cost $1.99 plus a 50 cent download fee per track, compared to $0.99 songs on the Internet. “Who is going to download complete records by cellular?” Rens said. “[The people who download music] will download on computers and then synchronize with portable devices.” Rens has a unique take on the success of the world’s most popular music device: “What is the iPod? It’s a way to circumvent the cellular carriers,” he said.
Which begs the question how the booming small screen entertainment business, including two-minute television segments called mobisodes, or the Mobifest, Canada’s first one-minute mobile film festival, will fare.
Duncan Kennedy, president of NowNow Corp., which is producing the Mobifest, draws a line between repurposing TV and creating something specifically for the small screen. The mobile audience demands “short attention span theatre,” he said. “They’re interrupt-driven. If you’re watching a mobile film on your phone and your phone rings, you stop watching the film.”
Unlike the iPod experience, which is isolated and non-interactive, Kennedy said made-for-mobile movies, which tend to have no sound so there is no need for a headset, are a shared experience. It’s part of the viral video world, where a short clip shown on Saturday Night Live can receive 30 times the audience when transmitted over the Internet.
When asked about the cost of movie downloads, Kennedy said that will be determined by the carriers and “there are different ways carriers charge for data and downloads.”
Rens remained skeptical: “Youngsters are the most interested in [experiences like this] and they don’t have the money. I don’t see, with the infrastructure and rates, how [the Mobifest] can be a success.”
In fact, getting a handle on Canadian data service capabilities as we shift from voice to data and video services is precisely the focus of an upcoming CATAAlliance study. Headed up by Rens, the study will “try to find out the usage, and is there any usage that is specifically Canadian,” he said.
Although mobility has 10 per cent annual growth, is the fastest growing segment of the Canadian telecommunications industry and more than 50 per cent of Canadians have cellular phones, “these figures only tell part of the story,” Rens said. We lag behind the world, and the study hopes to provide answers that will help us catch up.
It remains to be seen whether that catching up will come in the form of more wireless content developed for non-networks, or increased informal networks like Montreal’s Wireless Island, which covers the city with free hotspots. Perhaps success will lie in bi-mode phones, which switch from cellular to hotspot, or in some unique North American approach, which takes into account that we, unlike other parts of the world, introduce new technologies to the corporate market first.
“Vendors, telcos and carriers are taking new phones, services and all sorts of funky new functions and throwing them willy-nilly at the wall, hoping some of them will stick,” Levy said. “Somewhere in that flurry of advertisement for downloadable ringtones, videos and all sorts of things you can do on your phone is probably the killer app of tomorrow.”
But for now “the universal access system,” as de Kerckhove called the cellphone, is basically no more than a phone.
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