Although new devices and operating systems are yielding new opportunities for mobile entertainment, an old problem--fragmentation--continues to pose significant challenges for content providers, according to MTV Networks' EVP of digital distribution Greg Clayman. Speaking Tuesday at the Mobile Entertainment Live! event in Las Vegas, Clayman said MTV is seeing major growth in mobile video, stating that U.S. consumers downloaded more than 100 million mobile clips in 2008, roughly double the previous year's total. In addition, mobile web traffic continues to increase, and MTV also has sold hundreds of thousands of premium applications developed for Apple's iPhone. "The apps business prior to the iPhone was a tough business for us," Clayman said, citing the expense of porting applications to multiple device platforms.
According to Clayman, MTV is now focusing the majority of its application development efforts on smartphones, although the firm continues to consider the feature phone population in its mobile web development. "There's a lot more [feature phones] can do on the web, and we're building more interactivity into those sites," he said.
Media platform fragmentation also presents continuing challenges for companies like MTV. "TV viewing is up this year, and cable subscriptions are up. Online viewing is also growing," Clayman said. "The problem is that it's all very separate. It's measured separately, and it's hard to put all of it together." The evolution to multi-screen content distribution and consumption nevertheless represents the future of entertainment, Clayman said: "We're now in a world where it doesn't matter where you view a piece of content--as long as it grows the overall market, we don't care where people are watching it."