One of the issues that is bandied about frequently when conversation turns to mobile distribution of adult content is the quality of video streaming. Sure, the direct-to-phone video content that’s available right now is impressive, but that may be because mobile content streaming still is in the honeymoon phase. The novelty factor of any new technology tends to make it seem pretty cool even if it doesn’t quite measure up when compared to other, more mature modalities.
That’s one of the reasons Clippz, a technology company based in Cardiff, South Wales, developed Clippz Cascade, a software product that allows content owners to provide higher-than-mobile-quality video to mobile devices.
According to founder and chief executive officer Philip John, the latest generation of cellular phones essentially comprises portable media players with voice capabilities. He also says that given the chance and a little education, consumers will learn to think of them that way. “What we’re proposing is a fairly new and radical way of delivering mobile video,” John says. “You see, content [for cell phones] doesn’t have to travel over the mobile network. We’ve got a lot of education to do [in order to] show people what is achievable.”
Clippz technology is radical because it requires users to download video to their PCs and then transfer it to their mobile phones via USB or Bluetooth link. The resulting playback on a video-capable phone is remarkably clearer and crisper than video downloaded over the wireless airwaves. The process is called “sideloading,” and it’s possible on as many as 40 percent of the cell phones currently in use in the U.K. and as many as 30 percent of the phones in the U.S. “All the more expensive phones support good-quality video,” says John. “The market is quite large.”
What makes Clippz Cascade interesting is that it’s easy for both content owners and consumers to use and automatically optimizes the finished product for a large variety of phones. Clippz has spent quite a bit of time and what John calls “an enormous amount of money” purchasing and researching a collection of cell phones that would make any gadget retailer proud. The research and software coding to support new models never stops, he says.
In addition to allowing content owners to provide a more attractive product to consumers, Clippz Cascade also allows them to overcome the three major factors that combine to keep mobile video content from reaching its full potential: censorship, cost, and network speed. “The network is a logjam,” John says. “Even 3G networks are still very limited in terms of the data you can get through them. Mobile networks don’t get anywhere near broadband speeds.”
In addition to transmission speed, mobile network limitations also affect the size of files that can be downloaded. Files must be severely “sized down” in order to fit through the pipes. Financial limitations are less of a concern, but still worth considering: Anything classified as “data traffic” by the networks is subject to a different fee structure than that which applies to standard voice traffic; therefore, large video files are expensive for consumers to obtain. In most cases, they must pay a per-minute data-transfer fee in addition to the cost of the clip.
Censorship, of course, rears its ugly head in the form of carriers—at least in the U.S.—that refuse to allow explicit adult content to traverse their networks at all.
Clippz Cascade addresses all three issues, but at a price. “We’re targeting more toward the higher end of the market,” at least for the foreseeable future, John reveals. The product bears a price tag in excess of $20,000, but as John notes, “bigger companies can recoup that amount very quickly.”
The software product consists of three parts: the encoder for creating downloadable video files (currently for PCs only), a Web-based database of phone models, and a downloadable tool that is free to consumers and allows them to move Clippz files from their PCs to their phones.
A demo version of Clippz Cascade is available at Clippz.com.
