Future-look: will streaming of your home content to a mobile be the future?

There is a (large) school of thought that says that the future of digital content is ubiquitous access, with the home acting as a hub of sorts, and multiple satellite devices pulling ‘your’ content on-demand.

In theory I think this sounds fantastic, and the love-affair with doing this has been quite a passionate one – evidenced by the numbers of companies trying to make it happen. If you take a look at most consumer electronics companies, mobile vendors/operators, and service providers, all are attacking the ‘convergent’ market with some gusto….

…. but I’d argue that very few of them are making any money. The technical barriers and challenges created by device diversity really are huge, and unless you lock down the delivery chain (I’ll come to that in a minute), then you have a big tech challenge on your hands – especially when you consider users just expect stuff to work, often out of the box!

Locking the delivery chain does help somewhat – you can specify content, formats, devices, and delivery bearers – and if you have a good business strategy, you can make money at it. Probably the best example here (I think) is Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) – actually their convergent strategy is heavily about moving volumes of hardware, where they make significant margins (if the cost breakdowns of their components are to be believed).

But in a wider sense, does the high-level thinking that being able to access your content anywhere, over any network, actually hold true? Is this something consumers really want, or is it a pipe dream? One thing is for sure – the fortunes of a large number of companies are bet heavily in this area. It’s going to be very interesting to see which ones emerge as leaders in the pack….!

Do you desperately want to stream your home content to a Mobile (Internet) device? Leave us a comment ….