MobiTV's Tricia Higgins, VP of Strategic Partnerships
Phone users today are demanding higher quality mobile streaming video on their phones and other wireless devices. And MobiTV, a privately held technology company, is rising to the challenge. The Emeryville, California business now dominates the market with ten million subscribers.
The company delivers mobile streaming video and audio from its content partners (NBC, MTV, ABC, FOX, ESPN) to all major U.S. carriers. Its technology enables live, video on demand (VOD) and stored multimedia on over 400 mobile phones, personal computers and tablets via cellular or Wi-Fi networks.
Celebrating its tenth year in business, MobiTV in partnership with ESPN recently streamed over 100 million minutes of the World Cup soccer tournament . That’s equivalent to one viewer spending over 62,000 consecutive days in front of a TV. The event also generated one million downloads of its iPhone app and increased paid subscriptions by 200%. (Average viewing time is 31 minutes.)
Tricia Higgins, VP of Strategic Partnerships at the company, talks about the company’s growth and mobile streaming video in her podcast interview. In particular, she points out the heightened engagement by Android users, who view 25% more minutes than other mobile phone consumers. MobiTV’s recent support of the Sprint HTC EVO, Motorola Backflip and T-Mobile’s Samsung Vibrant is also driving more Android phone owners to the service.
During the interview, Tricia discusses the future of mobile streaming video and MobiTV. She believes that cloud computing will expand rapidly, permitting consumers to access media across devices. 4G wireless networks will also improve the user experience with its higher bandwidth and improved video and sound quality.
An Associated Press story, released today, describes how mobile video streaming on smartphones with larger screens competes with traditional television viewing:
“Instead of gathering to turn our faces to the blue glow of the living-room set, maybe we’ll curl up, each in our own little world, with a phone or tablet in our lap. They don’t look as good as HDTV’s, but we won’t have to fight over remotes any more. An iPhone held 7.5 inches from my eye looks just as big as a 46-inch TV, 10 feet away.”
While Tricia agrees to some extent, she points out the social aspect when watching television with others. Mobile convergence, however, is changing how individuals consume media. They may download content to one device, then view it on another without where they left off. It’s similar to reading an e-book on a Kindle, pausing, then continuing to read on an iPad.
The company is a strong believer in communicating with customers. Its Facebook group site, Twitter page and company blog engage users in the company and offer news about the service. The customer care team at the company also uses social media to resolve customer issues.
Learn more about the dynamic world of mobile streaming video in the podcast.
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MobiTV, Inc. is the leading provider of technology solutions that deliver media over wireless and broadband networks. Its flexible platform powers an end-to-end managed service for content ingestion, encoding and optimized delivery of media for major mobile operators including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.
MobiTV, Inc. powers the experiences of live television, premium and prime time programming, video-on-demand, as well as digital and satellite music services across hundreds of mobile handsets on all major device platforms including RIM, BREW, Java, Android, iPhone, WebOS, WinMo, Palm and more.
The strength of the MobiTV, Inc. technology platform is showcased through the company’s own product called MobiTV, a feature-rich, personalized and intuitive mobile media experience that includes content from marquee brands like NBC, MTV, ABC, FOX, ESPN and more.
Tricia Higgins is Vice President, Strategic Partnerships at MobiTV and is responsible for evaluating, developing and managing key relationships with external partners. As a member of the CTO organization, Higgins participates in defining MobiTV’s strategic technology direction, identifying synergies and establishing technology partnerships that are consistent with that overall strategy.
In addition, Higgins is responsible for developing some of MobiTV’s largest and most strategic customer partnerships on a global basis, effectively developing pre-sales relationships and managing post sales implementation of services across multiple device platforms.
Upon joining MobiTV in 2005, Higgins was initially responsible for growing MobiTV’s reach worldwide, which involved managing complex, cross platform implementations of MobiTV services in North America, the U.K. and Latin America.
Prior to joining MobiTV, Higgins was employed by Vodafone and responsible for managing the implementation of the enabling technology behind the Vodafone Live! platform to numerous Vodafone affiliate carriers in the EMEA region, including deployments in Sweden, Switzerland, Romania and Hungary.
She holds a Bachelor of Science from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
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