Ever wonder what the person sitting next to you is staring at on their iPod? We definitely do, so we conducted a study of mobile video to get some answers. Last week my coworker, April, attended the HotMobile 2007 conference in Tucson, AZ presenting the results of our user study.

Side note: if you're ever visiting Tucson, the Westin La Paloma is a sweet place to stay (especially on someone else's dime). I highly recommend alternating between the giant water slide and the hot tub. Too much work makes Jack a dull boy!

April and I conducted part of the study in California and our colleague Kenton did the same in England. We selected 28 people, ages ranging from 14 to 47 and using various devices and asked them to keep a journal for three weeks. Then we met with each person and asked lots of questions about their experiences. I was particularly interested in the social element of mobile video use. For instance, how do people find content and how do they share it with friends?

Here are some highlights of what we talked about in our presentation. Feel free to flip through our slides. The blank slides are where the videos were in the original talk. They didn't make it through the conversion on SlideShare.net. Neither did the fonts.

Update: it seems that the embedded object from SlideShare.net isn't cooperating with HP's blog software, so click here to see the slideset.

Comedy is king. Nearly every person we spoke to, from young to old, watched comedy on their devices and much of it was cartoons. Comedy is still funny the second and third time you watch it so it doesn't need to be deleted as quickly as other content. People said that cartoons look good on a small screen and we saw that many people were watching shows like South Park, The Simpsons, and The Family Guy, and many others. If you're a video content producer and you're thinking about targeting the mobile device, you should be thinking about comedy. The appeal of comedy is also influenced by its duration. When you remove the commercials (gasp!) from a sitcom you're left with about 22 minutes of video...which leads us to the next observation...

15-20 mins is about the limit of the typical mobile video session. We heard unsolicited comments about eye strain and the discomfort of holding a device in front of them beyond this amount of time. Another note to content producers - segment your content in bite-size chunks.


Video formats are super confusing for people. In a room full of engineers you would be hard pressed (and I've tried this) to find a handful of people who understand the difference among MPEG-2 (DVDs), H.264 (iPods), Motion JPEG (some digital cameras) and streaming Flash (YouTube), without even considering the additional complexity of DRM. Just imagine how confusing this must be for the typical consumer. This was certainly reflected in the comments from our participants. The most common quote with regard to formats: "Can you tell me how to convert my DVDs to my iPod?". Users don't care about DRM and MPEG-4. They just want to be able to watch their content on whatever device is most convenient for them at the moment. This amounts to a challenge to technologists: "liquefy" our media -- enable its ability to flow from one device to another.

People watch mobile video in bed. We were surprised by this and we weren't looking for it. We asked people if they watched mobile video at home. Again and again people told us that they watched their mobile devices in bed, usually before going to sleep. Some wanted to be near their spouses who were watching something else on TV. Some just wanted to watch something quick to relax. People were so determined in this activity, that they found make-shift solutions to make it work. For example, one girl would turn the volume up to eleven and lay her headphones on the pillow to deal with the lack of an external speaker on her iPod. Another woman removed the flip cover from her iPAQ and re-installed it backwards to act as a stand. This is certainly an interesting discovery and something that hardware makers should keep in mind.

That's all great, but this is a blog about social tech innovation and I don't want to disappoint [both people who read this blog]. So here's where the social element comes into this...

Searching for content is fun. People spent at least as much time trolling the internet for good, free content with the purpose of sharing with friends.. Some browsed the iTunes web site for the free videos. Some searched for *.mp4 and *.mpg on Limewire and BitTorrent for that cool skateboarding clip that no one else has seen. These gold nuggets of media are then used to exchange with friends and act as a form of social currency, like finding a baseball card no one else has. Except when you're talking about digital media, you can give a copy to a friend and keep a copy for yourself. There is a place in the market for a social technology that rewards these "diggers", people who are motivated to find that one video that will act as social currency in their networks.

Maybe you can relate to this. When I hand my iPod to someone, I'm quietly thinking to myself about what content they will see on my device and what conclusions they will make about me as a result. "Oh, this guy is a closet metal-head" or "Kelly Clarkson? Dude, what a sissy." Well it turns out I'm not alone. People consider their mobile device and the content it contains as a reflection of their identity. Take heed device makers - don't make dorky looking products.