Shooting for a Bigger Audience on the Smaller Screen

Shera Jenne of Discovery Communications in Silver Spring edits archival footage of the "World's Ugliest Dog Competition" for use on the Internet and possibly on cellphones. (By Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post)

But "a lot needs to happen in order for this to become a reality," said David Sanderson, head of Bain's global media practice, such as improvements in infrastructure, better handset technology and greater consumer demand.

Entertainment companies, though, think they can't miss out. Media conglomerates such as News Corp. began making original content for mobile phones last year, starting with Fox's creation of a parallel version of the action series "24." National Geographic Ventures, the for-profit arm of the National Geographic Society, is creating high-action shorts of natural phenomena such as tornados and hurricanes, which Chief Operating Officer Ted Prince refers to as "weather porn."

Discovery, which has nearly 700 million television subscribers worldwide, has the benefit of experience in Europe, Asia and Latin America, where better wireless infrastructure and more sophisticated services have spurred widespread adoption of mobile video. The company knows, for example, that the markets are idiosyncratic: Mini-personality tests, it has found, are popular among cellphone subscribers in Latin America.

The job of feeding content to small screens falls to a six-person team inside the new-media department. Four "preditors" -- industry short-hand for producers/writers/editors -- create programming for Web sites and mobile phones, combing the companies' hundreds of thousands of hours of footage for segments that can be knit into cellphone-size bits of up to two minutes. Instead of a two-hour documentary on zebras in the Serengeti, animal footage is more likely to take the form of "Top Five Takedowns," which lets viewers vote by text message on their favorite clip of predators attacking prey.

Mobile clips that tie into current productions are being devised that provide extra content and advertise the original program. The annual "World's Ugliest Dog Competition" show won't be ready for television broadcast for a few more months, even though the contest is finished. An interview with the winning dog's owner, created exclusively for use online and possibly on mobile phones, was ready in a few weeks and offered digital audiences something they won't see on television.

The producers are given artistic license to dice images as they see fit, said Discovery's senior vice president for new media, Clint Stinchcomb. But they follow some general rules. The tone, for example, is more intimate. A sample clip on King Tut's tomb eschewed the typical "voice of God" narration, as Stinchcomb described it, and instead referred to the historic figure as "the boy king with all the bling."

Videos for the Web tend to be longer, because those viewers are more likely to be sitting at a desk, as opposed to mobile phone users who are on the go, said producer Jacob Cross. Cross and colleague Shera Jenne also try to avoid images and graphics that are dark or move quickly.

"On such a small screen, the viewer is more likely to miss it," Jenne said.

Discovery officials would not say whether their mobile operations are profitable. If they aren't making money now, officials are upbeat about the future. Unlike the Internet, where businesses often put content online for free and hope to make money later, mobile video comes with an established method of extracting revenue: your cellphone bill. Just as in cable television, programmers such as Discovery get a cut of the subscription fee consumers pay to wireless carriers.

"If we were asking [consumers] to put in a credit card number, the business would not be as good as it has been," said Greg Clayman, MTV Networks vice president for wireless strategy and operations.

Baer and other cable-industry executives expect advertising will become a second major source of revenue. Programmers such as Fox have just begun to experiment with commercials.

As wireless technology in the United States advances and the viewing experience improves, Discovery executives expect to show longer programs. Trials in the United States and Britain have revealed people watched Discovery shows on their cellphones for an average of 24 minutes, twice a day, usually while commuting.

Executives at MediaFlo USA Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Inc., have found that Americans are potentially more addicted to the tube. MediaFlo is building a mobile video broadcast network in the United States separate from cellphone networks, which don't have the capacity to support heavy video usage.

"We figured . . . you would watch when you're waiting in the airport or at the doctor's office. We've found that people are using it in the bathroom in their house, in the kitchen . . . places where there isn't a TV," President Gina Lombardi said. "They watch all times of the day. . . . Some people are doing it at work, on breaks and on lunchtimes."

Discovery also hopes eventually to marry global positioning technology with cellphone commerce. It recently created a new business unit around its travel-related programming so that it can take advantage of the day when consumers can use cellphones to get information and make purchases based on their physical location, such as booking hotels or arranging audio tours of historic sites. The technology exists but the applications aren't there yet, Stinchcomb said.

And when that happens, Discovery wants a cut of that transaction.

Mobile commerce is "the holy grail," Stinchcomb said.