Our section of the event aimed to encourage the users to participate in the debate by hosting an open brainstorm after a brief run down of the current relationship between Film and mobile platforms such as mobile phones. The results were a little bizarre, but we uncovered some pertinent issues all the same…

The talk had varied speakers from Dr Tom ‘have you read this book’ Abba and Rik ‘new internet tv ideas’ Lander who both rocked out with their own projects. The lovely host Vicky ‘wonky’ Brophy chaired a great night and judging from the comments (some in French!), people loved it.

Thought Den were invited to chair a discussion on the Distribution of Video to Mobile and explore the current scene, but no one had hair nearly as good as Ben’s last night…

The Session

Started by covering work on Happy Packages and discussing Distribution to Mobile devices. This delved into the history of Film & Mobile technology, from the first personal cameras and camera phones all the way into Bluetooth, purchasing of 3G bandwidth, codecs, current internet virals (Cadburys Gorrilla, Sony Bravia Paint & Balls) and curved beautifully into where the two genres begin to meet.

A perfect example is The Royal Navy’s – Get the Message site which unions the two technologies and lets the user send personalised video content either through their email or to their mobile.

It’s clear Mobile technology is gearing itself up for accepting higher bandwidth film content, and so we whipped out the famous, Media against Time graph, which based on really er… scientific data, shows how Media is increasing over time… scientific, yup.

The Discussion

Every member of the audience had one of three cards to prompt them into thinking about,

• Scenarios – where someone’s using their mobile phone
• Content – to deliver to the mobile phone
• People – who’s going to be using the content

which when pieced together into scenarios, eg, In the cafe + Football videos + My Granny, they allowed us to explore some of the wider thoughts concerned with Mobile Distribution of Film in the following catagories.

• Types of content
• How & Why
• Issues
• Distribution Models & Revenue Streams

The Results

These were bluetoothed ou on the night to the audience along with some very kindly donated videos by Team Rubber called DudeCorp,

• Types of Content – Plumbing, Corrie, Recipies, Football films…

• How & Why – Grandson’s suggestion, Covert interest, Accidentally…

• Issues – Cost, Stuttering, Poor Eye sight, Screen size…

• Distribution Models & Revenue Streams – Free, Supscription, Pay per view, Sponsored content…

We’re chairing part of the interaction to uncover everyone’s thoughts this Thursday (27/03/08) at the Watershed 7PM. It promises to be an interesting night and we’ll be utilising some of our Bluetooth technologies so we’d love you to come. As always, there’ll be drinks in the bar afterwards!

For more details, see the Cineformation site.