Tag: mobile devices

Mobile entertainment service under development at AT&T

| December 11, 2015

According to the telecom company’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, it will soon be taking this big step.

Telco giant, AT&T currently has a mobile entertainment service in the works, according to its CEO and chairperson, Randall Stephenson, who recently spoke on the subject at an investor conference.

Stephenson discussed the company’s intentions to launch a service to compete with Go90 from Verizon.

The CEO also stated that AT&T plans to use this new mobile entertainment service as a part of an aggressive effort to provide an OTT content bundle for people who are not satellite television subscribers and who have either a single home television or who prefer to view their entertainment media over mobile. He pointed out that there are currently an estimated 30 million homes in the country that don’t subscribe to pay television services.

Through mobile entertainment services, AT&T is “very interested” in reaching more cost-conscious consumers.

Mobile Enteratinment - at&tStephenson also said that the company would soon be discussing this mobile media service in much more detail. That said, it was not at all made clear whether or not the service would be made available in the very near future or if consumers would need to wait for some time before they would be able to take advantage of this new choice.

Aside from the exclusively mobile technology side of the spectrum, Stephenson said that the company would soon be making an announcement with regards to premium content package. That announcement is expected to be made in January. What is expected is what the CEO called “mobile stacked content together with a really robust wireless asset.”

These announcements were made by the CEO while he spoke at the 43rd Annual Global Media and Communications Conference, which took place in New York. Though analysts were expecting him to offer more details for analysts following the DirecTV acquisition, that wasn’t the case.

Instead, he focused most of his attention on discussing the two primary ways in which content would now be delivered and the fact that they are “buying a big bundle of content” and that they “are also streaming the content to a mobile device.”

BBC changes strategy for journalists to better suit mobile devices

| November 10, 2015

The new guidelines include a recommendation for shorter and less formal videos to suit news consumption trends.

BBC journalists have now been instructed that their news videos should be less formal and shorter, in order to better appeal to the shift that the public has been making toward mobile devices when they consume the news.

These new guidelines were created and issued to reporters under the title of “How to Win at Mobile”.

Journalists were instructed to try to keep their videos limited to 60 to 90 seconds in length, as this is considered to be more appealing to people who will be viewing them on social media and mobile devices, said the documents. The guidelines use certain popular sources such as Vice and Buzzfeed, which were both in attendance at a recent conference. The guidelines were meant to provide advice with regards to the ways in which to better reach the millennial generation, who are much less trusting of mainstream media, and who “prize authenticity, immediacy and vibrancy.”

The BBC stated that this strategy was simply to better suit mobile devices and not to try to imitate others.

Mobile Devices - BBCAccording to a spokesperson from the company, “We are committed to providing the trusted news we know audiences value and expect from the BBC, at the same time we must also keep pace with the way people want to access news. This means more public service news via mobile so it can be personal, portable and on-demand.”

These new instructions were created as a component of Project Newstream at the BBC. Project Newstream is a type of initiative designed to ensure that the content produced by the corporation will be more mobile friendly. It was first unveiled in September by its director general, Tony Hall.

Upon first unveiling the strategy, Hall explained that the corporation would be using the next decade in order to “ride two horses – serving those who have adopted the internet and mobile media, while at the same time making sure that those who want to carry on watching and listening to traditional channels continue to be properly served too.”

This change in direction has arrived at the same time that the BBC has been struggling to justify the online news coverage that it has been creating, in face of the criticism that it has been receiving from commercial rivals. Several newspaper industry players who are in direct competition with the new media organizations when it comes to snatching up online advertising spending, have said that the BBC should be scaling back its operations in terms of digital news for PC and mobile devices.