Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Robert Tercek and PacketVideo think media convergence is headed for your cell phone.
Dec 20, 1999 | If Robert Tercek has it right, ground zero for media convergence won't be the morphing of your PC and television. The ultimate convergence appliance will be the battered cell phone buried in your purse or briefcase -- or at least a future generation of it. Tercek, 36, is so convinced of the centrality of wireless mobile devices in our content future that he is leaving a cushy position as senior vice president of digital media for Sony Pictures Entertainment to become president of Packet Video Networks, the content division for PacketVideo.
PacketVideo was formed last year by James Carol and James Brailean with investments from Siemens and Intel. The plan is to market technologies that allow content providers to stream video and other rich media to cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other wireless mobile devices. The San Diego startup, which holds six video-compression patents, recently collaborated with Sony to deliver movie trailers to cell phones at 14.4 kbps wireless network speeds.
Tercek's move to PacketVideo is in keeping with a career that has evolved with the technology. He has toiled in a succession of emerging digital platforms in the '90s. He began the decade in cable as director of on-air promotions for MTV, then rode the CD-ROM wave as a founder of a company called 7th Level. ("Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time" was a hit title.) By the mid-'90s, Tercek had migrated to the Web, creating the webisodic "Candidate 96" for TCI and later guiding the development of online games as vice president of online programming at Columbia Tri-Star Interactive.
Elevated to senior vice president for Digital Media last year, the peripatetic and perpetually jetlagged Tercek has logged tens of thousands of miles keeping up with ITV developments in Europe and Asia. Tercek assumed the daunting task of setting up Sony's interactive TV production unit and formulating the studio's broadband strategy. He introduced ITV versions of "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy" for WebTV this September.
Tall, angular and cerebral, Tercek has a reputation as a provocateur at industry forums. In a now infamous sting before an industry crowd last September, he told Digital Entertainment Network CEO David Neuman that his company's business model was the equivalent of "burning hundred dollar bills on the corner of Fairfax and Sunset."
With the move to PacketVideo, Tercek enters the undefined world of wireless content delivery. "Mobility," he says, employing his favorite epithet, will be "huge."
Why are you leaving your studio job to get into the wireless video business?
Choice and convenience have been a part of all the programming I've worked on. In my career I went from cable to satellite to the Internet, and more recently broadband and interactive television. Network television gave you three choices -- CBS, NBC and ABC. For a price, cable gave you more choice. For more complicated pricing, satellite gave you even more choice. With the Internet, you don't just get unlimited choice but convenience. Wireless will give you not just the choices of the Internet -- and eventually cable and satellite -- but the ability to decide when, where and how to consume all this content. To me, this is what this progression of platforms has been leading up to.
Your cell phone will become a player for all sorts of streaming media. A cell phone should be an MP3 player, a radio, a PC. It'll be a super-flexible device that can do everything. The telephony sphere is growing geometrically. The population of cell phones to PCs is about even now, but the growth curve for cell phones is much faster.
I don't want to sound hopelessly optimistic. I look at this as taking a couple years to roll out, not a couple months.
What are the obstacles to rolling all this out?
Wireless networks have to be upgraded. That gets solved over time. The upgrades are underway in Europe and Japan already, and that's going to put pressure on the U.S. to upgrade their networks as well. The U.S. is the big beneficiary here. Because our cellular infrastructure is not as advanced as in some other countries, we'll get the stuff that has been tested and proven in other markets.
Another obstacle is convincing content providers that there is a future in wireless multimedia. The challenge is getting those providers to sign up with us before there are huge numbers of subscribers for those services.
What are the attributes of the cell phone as a content medium?
The key attribute of mobile wireless is that you can take it with you. It's that old Marshall McLuhan saw -- the medium is the message. How we communicate affects what we communicate. When video becomes mobile, it's going to be a lot more active, highly under the control of users and purposeful. It's going to be the opposite of the sitting-in-the-living-room experience. If you're going to program for people with the mobile mindset, you've got to think interactive.
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