After all the rumors and anticipation, Apple announced the iPhone 4S. Not quite the anticipated iPhone 5 – but we are still excited that Apple also believes that great quality, real-time, mobile video is important. The iPhone 4S will ship with iOS 5 complete with HD 1080p for video capture and image stabilization.
Why is this important?
One of the main reasons video has had spotty acceptance within corporations is because it is often out of reach of the average employee. Video has typically been left to the corporate IT expert of self-professed department techie.
While Android devices have had HD quality video for nearly a year, Apple is the thought leader in the mobile space and their decision to embrace HD mobile capture reflects the coming of age of personal video creation and distribution. Now, most employees will have HD-quality mobile capture solutions on in the palm of their hand and the market will be driving tools to make it even easier to capture and edit video.
Now the corporate challenge shifts from “how do we get HD quality video” to “how do we best store, manage and distribute video to provide better communications across the enterprise – to all employees and constituents — both inside and outside of the firewall.” Let’s see how this would work in a real-life scenario. Consider the real estate professional. Now, for the first time, a real estate agent can capture the pure excitement and enthusiasm of their client moving into their first home. Nothing planned. Nothing staged. No camera man. No studio. That HD-quality testimonial can go straight from the real estate’s mobile phone to be stored and managed in the marketing department’s testimonial video portal, then distributed to other agents, clients and prospects no matter where they are located.
As you see, the ability to store, manage and distribute video — well that’s what we do here at VBrick so you can appreciate why we see Apple’s announcement as further proof of where video is going.
Just a few comments:
First, 1080P is not a measure of quality. It is a format for the delivery of content. On a screen that has 1920×1080 pixels, you can present a 1:1 representation of an image created with the defined 1080P resolution. On a 3.5″ diagonal screen with “960-by-640-pixel resolution at 326 ppi” (direct quote from Apple’s site), you cannot display 1080 lines of anything. The best reproduction of any imagery on a screen of that spec would be something taken at 960-by-640-pixel resolution. What this means is that although the phone is able to display a 1080P formatted image or stream, it is not doing it at 1080 anything. The phone’s display circuitry is modifying the image to fit the screen, compressing it or eliminating a portion of the image to make it fit.
Second, image stabilization in a camera that does not use moving lens elements to shift the image on the image sensor to compensate for motion of the camera caused by an unsteady hand is done by using an algorithm to use only a part of the image sensor area to capture the image — shifting that area to compensate for the motion. This way you are not getting the full resolution possible from that image sensor.
And, third, most corporations don’t allow video in their corporate systems because it takes up too much bandwidth and storage which is costly and can interfere with the normal corporate network traffic, not because video was “out of reach of the average employee.” Additionally, many companies do not allow their employees to use video or photographic capture on their company mobile devices is for security and privacy concerns. That is the main reason many companies only offer mobile devices without those features.
Apple also has a fairly low penetration in the corporate mobile world compared to RIM and MS.
None of this is to say that it isn’t important to be able to properly store, manage and distribute video in any environment, including personal and business situations.
Hi Bill.
There are two pieces to this puzzle. The ability to record and often stream video from mobile devices is getting easier everyday. The new iPhone’s camera just reinforces that HD quality video is readily available and the power of this can be realized at the corporate level. Especially for someone like me who telecommutes. The value of being able to watch a presentation or have someone ad-hoc record a white board session and then be able to deliver that to me is great. I know videoconferencing solves a similar problem, but videoconferencing isn’t always available or timely. Despite the actual technical specifications I think we can agree that the new iPhone’s video quality is significantly better than it was.
Having been in the video communications industry for almost 20 years I can say with certainty that corporations do want video and have enjoyed video applications for a long time. Think videoconferencing. VBrick itself has been providing streaming solutions to corporations for 13 years. But you don’t necessarily want , or is it technically feasible, to have everyone in an organization attached to a VC. It is desirable and technically feasible to have everyone watching a live stream at their desktop. Today’s network can without a doubt handle video from a bandwidth perspective, multicasting protocols have been around for a long time, and where a network isn’t multicast capable there are ways to distribute video that don’t impact bandwidth consumption. Regarding storage…I have to disagree. I think it is more plentiful and as cost effective as ever. Not to mention that great strides have been made in video encoding , such as H.264, that provide much better quality and at much lower bitrate and therefore less file size, than compared to something like MPEG-2.