A very interesting news bite from our clients at Brand Republic talks about how the latest data is showing that the MobileTV initiative has failed to gain ground (in fact has lost ground) and is partly due to the success of the iPhone.
For me (a user of the iTouch) I can see why this could definitely be the case. Brightcove 3 is all geared up for delivery to the iPhone and it would seem to me that any publisher serious about including mobile delivery into their video strategy should really think about including the iPhone as a delivery endpoint.
To do this you need the following bit of kit:
1 x Brightcove 3 account set up for Progressive Download (they default to RTMP Streaming)
1 x Media API read account
All videos encoded ot the H.264 Base Profile (BC3 Server Side encoding uses this as its default transcoding)
either
1 x iPhone Developer / Development agency (they use Objective C for programming)
or
1 x Web Developer that makes can make an iPhone compatible web page
What it all boils down to though is uploading your videos to your BC3 PD account and referencing the MediaAPI to get the video path to play out via the Player API.
Some samples of the 2 approaches are:
Our partner Best Before has done a iPhone/BC3 integration
and our Professional Services team has done a great job at Sun Microsystems
There are some caveats to this:
Because the iPhone doesn't (yet) support streaming the files are effectively downloaded to the device over HTTP and that comes with all the caveats around security and distribution - have a read here at an earlier post examining this.
All in all though you should have a definite good think about updating your distribution strategy to delivery to the iPhone and other such devices. The market is there.