Mobile Video Portal

Master's Thesis

Alex Kotchnev, April 2007

Abstract:

Historically, mobile phones were used only for voice calls; however, in recent years mobile phones are moving towards becoming “smartphones” - personalized computing devices with small form factors accomplishing various tasks ranging from the basic voice call services, to text messaging, Internet access, mobile gaming, and audio playback. Video is the richest communication and entertainment medium that is available through a multitude of channels ranging from traditional TV, Cable, and Satellite channels, to online media outlets for commercial and user generated content such as YouTube, iTunes, and Google Video.

Despite the ubiquity of video content, increasing handset capabilities, and constantly increasing mobile bandwidth, it is still rare that mobile handsets are used for viewing video content. Mobile devices are significantly more restricted than the general purpose computers in terms of availability of resources such as device computing power, memory, storage, persistent network connections, bandwidth, video and network protocol support. Thus, for typical users it is close to impossible to access and consume online video content without becoming experts in computer technology and video encoding.

The Mobile Video Portal (MVP) is a system that significantly simplifies the consumption of video content by a mobile user. It addresses the problems of delivering video content by creating an tightly integrated platform based on standard Java EE server side technology, general purpose video production tools, and a mobile client based on Jave ME technology. Despite not being able to overcome the inherent issues with the mobile platform, the system focuses on delivering a solution by focusing on the capabilities of mobile devices, instead of dismissing the mobile platform because of its deficiencies.