Avot mV brings ALL of Online Video to your Mobile

Online Video

User generated content is now on an all time high and online video portals like YouTube and Revvr are fast becoming default destinations for Video content. Watching these videos on your PC is just matter of visiting those sites and making selections. Adobe provides a universal platform in the form of Flash and most of the video is streamed to you in real-time.

Video on Mobile

My first tryst with Mobile Video was the clipped ones I had on my Sony Clie SJ22 , a few years back. The video content needed time consuming transcoding operations and the results were not always stunning. After all it was a meager PDA!. Then after some time, YouTube transformed the way we perceived online video. Now I would want those Videos to play over my new Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphone(O2 XDA II Mini). But that platform was not enough, not even my next smartphone - the Cingular 8125 Wizard with the Windows Mobile 2005. The embedded RealPlayer tried it’s best to stream content, but always resulted in choppy video - my slow GPRS connection was also partly to blame.

Now you have the revolutionary iPhone, and it has made online video experience on the Smartphones kind of a norm. How can Microsoft and HTC resist the call. They equipped their latest offering, the HTC Touch with a neat Streaming Application which works pretty well with the PIE(Pocket Internet Explorer) and the integrated TouchFlo user interface. At the same time, Google has started transcoding most of the watched video content to be viewable on mobile devices. Now we have a mobile version of the YouTube. Wait.. It’s still not the Full YouTube!.

Avot mV brings ALL of Online Video to your Mobile

Avot Media is a company, hold your breath, launched by a bunch of Apple veterans - who were earlier leading the engineering efforts at Apple Inc. to bring you the revolutionary iPhone!. These talented guys have ventured into bringing the FULL of Online Video Content over to our Mobile Phones - with their excellent offering - Avot mV. You point your mobile device’s browser to m.avotmedia.com or Avot Mobile Site to download the free application.

My Review Platform

I tested Avot mV on my Cingular 8125. It is a HTC Wizard Class device. I was running a cooked Windows Mobile 6 OS with the TouchFlo interface. I tested Avot mV over both EDGE and WiFi. While Avot mV was being tested, I had always couple of programs like the PIE and the default phone application running.

Avot mV Advantages

• Avot mV is a carrier independent service
  • That means You never pay for carrier-selected carrier-controlled content. You have the full of free user-generated media at your command. You choose what you want to see, for free. This is not the case with competitive product offerings like RockTV. They are always friends with the Carrier, forgetting you and me!
• 4th Grader UI
  • What did I Say?!. Yes, I meant -  even a 4th grader can easily launch the Avot mV and see the thumbnails of featured videos arranged neatly in 3 columns, further tap on the one’s s/he wants. Different video  ‘Channels’ brings you categorized content. Creating a favorites list is also very straight forward as in clicking a ‘+’ symbol. All in all, Avot mV features a no nonsense interface. The UI of Avot mV is best explained as a unified video portal with content from YouTube, Google Video and many others. The Search is excellent and spans over many content portals. I also liked the search being saved for future sessions.
• Sound Technology
  • Avot mV has patented-codecs being used in it’s mobile client application. The innovations on it, helps minimize the effects of network latency and low bandwidth. Do remember, Avot mV always streams the content directly from the content sites. It works like a media optimized Flash platform for Mobile Devices. The FlashLite from Adobe is a Joke!
  • I saw Avot mV working pretty decently on my regular EDGE connection on the road and at its best over the Home WiFi.

What could be done better ?

• No work on Nokia!
  • Presently all the 70+ supported platforms are either Windows Mobile Pocket PC or SmartPhone platforms. My Nokia E61 needs Avot mV. I hope in future they will support Symbian Series 60 v3 and UIQ devices.
• Thumbnail vows
  • The three column thumbnail view does not scale well on the landscape view. It could also do well with some local caching of the home screen thumbnails.
• Browser Integration
  • Wish if I could bring up Avot mV instead of the HTC Streaming Application whenever I click on a video link. I think this won’t be a big challenge for the engineering teams at Avot than implementing the ultimate dream of playing the video inline with the mobile browser.
• Audio/Video Sync
  • I got a few audio sync problems while playing some YouTube videos over the EDGE connection. Even then the Video played well.

Conclusions

I sincerely feel, Avot mV codecs should be licensed by major Smartphone OS providers, especially Google in future, for their upcoming Google Phone. It has the potential to be the best optimized streaming media platform on the mobile. For latest developments check out the Avot Blog postings.