By Annys Shin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 17, 2006; D01
You can learn a lot from your cellphone.
You can find out the probability of being killed by a shark (less than by a bee), the best dog breed for you and renegade chef Anthony Bourdain's favorite music: "Any Rolling Stones song on the subject of drugs."
The question is, do you want to know any of this?
Executives at Discovery Communications Inc. think you do.
Applying lessons learned in markets overseas, the Silver Spring cable television programmer is ramping up its mobile video offerings in the United States, joining other entertainment companies in the quest to follow audiences wherever they go.
Where Fox's mobile entertainment group has created "mobisodes" for its hit shows "24" and "Prison Break," and Comedy Central has amused audiences with snippets of stand-up routines, Discovery Communications' service will fill the small screens with its own mix of facts, travel news and bloody animal fights.
"The mobile environment is the perfect fit for what Discovery does. . . . From travel to health to fun facts and great video about the world," said Donald A. Baer, senior executive vice president for strategy and development.
The official and broader debut of Discovery Mobile later this year is the cable company's latest attempt to push beyond the confines of the television tube. It has built a consumer Internet strategy around Cosmeo, a Web-based video study tool it is selling to schools and families. It has recently cut deals with iTunes and Google Earth, acquired a company that specializes in audio tours for museums worldwide, and launched three Web-only channels, with two more in the works. An online store for cellphone ring tones and wallpaper opened this month.
Privately owned by Discovery Holding Co., Cox Communications Inc., Advance/Newhouse Communications Inc. and founder and Chairman John S. Hendricks, Discovery was among the early developers of basic cable and digital channels and is trying to be among the first to exploit the potential of mobile video in the United States, a market still in its infancy. Market research firm NDP Group Inc. estimated in April that 20 percent of U.S. cellphones can support mobile video, but only 1 percent of subscribers have mobile video service.
Companies such as Sprint Nextel Corp. and Cingular Wireless LLC have begun offering video clips and programs streamed live for a monthly fee of $5 to $10 a month, on top of the cost of basic wireless phone service. Premium channels, such as ESPN, can cost an extra $5 a month.
Projections of how many Americans are likely to adopt mobile video vary wildly. Market analysis firm Jupiter Research recently estimated that the number of regular users of mobile video would grow to about 12 million by 2010. Another firm, Informa Telecoms & Media, projected that the number of U.S. consumers who watch some kind of video on a cellphone would rise from 1 million to 3 million by 2009.
Consulting firm Bain & Co. estimates that mobile content will grow from a $1.7 billion market to $16 billion over 10 years, with video making up more than a quarter of that.
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.