Watching the Olympics on Your Phone

Beijing 2008 is the first truly multi-media Games. New media coverage – live streaming video coverage on the Internet and mobile phone clips – will be available throughout the world through regional broadcasters licensed by the IOC and by the IOC itself in 77 unlicensed or non-exclusively licensed territories.

According to IOC Director of Television and Marketing Services, Timo Lumme, “For the first time in Olympic history, we will have complete global online coverage, and the IOC will have its own broadcast Channel and content production facilities. The IOC’s Channel will make fantastic Olympic footage available where young generations of sports fans are already going for online entertainment, and will complement the footage offered in these territories by our broadcast partners across all media platforms.”

Not All Mobile Carriers Perform Well

Keynote monitored a number of mobile sites in the US and Europe, including Yahoo Sports, NBC Olympics, L’equipe (France), and Eurosport, in the days leading up to the Olympics to get a baseline on general availability and performance. The graph below presents the time it took to download one popular page across four carriers in the U.S. (each color represents a U.S. carrier).

As you can see the carrier designated by the “pink” line graph lagged significantly behind the others. Part of the problem was the way the content provider built the mobile page. Embedded in the page were a number of small graphics images, each of which had to download over a mobile network connection, which is much slower than a desktop internet connection.

Of course, each network carrier uses different types of technologies to deliver mobile web content. Some carriers have faster networks than others do and because of this, have more download capacity.

For more detail on how the construction of the page impacted the performance on different carriers, see Shaving Seconds from Your Mobile Web Download Times.

The Mobile Juggernaut and Web 2.0

UK-based ITPro interviewed Keynote chief executive Umang Gupta in July and got his take on the most important trends in the internet world – the mobile juggernaut and Web 2.0.

Mobile Companies to Watch: Cha Cha

SMS moves into the digital “yellow pages” space, replacing both 411 and your City Guidebook. Anshu Agarwal talks about how Cha Cha presents compelling alternatives to 411.

Check in with Keynote at CTIA IT & Entertainment for Launch of Keynote MITE

Keynote will be at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2008, on September 10-12 in San Francisco. Keynote is launching Keynote Mobile Interactive Testing Environment (MITE) in booth # 920. Visit us and learn how to test and validate mobile content and services from your desktop using 1000+ device profiles.

Keynote Demos Mobile Testing at Web 2.0 Expo NYC: Get a Free Expo Pass

Sept: 16-19, Web 2.0 Expo, New York, NY. This is the inaugural Web 2.0 Expo and Keynote will be highlighting Keynote MITE. Web 2.0 Expo is for the builders of the next generation web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists; people who have experience to share and a passion for learning – the hot new thing, lessons from failures, innovations and inspirations, and the practical applications of all of the above. See Keynote in booth 1317. Use the code webny08com when you register and get $100 off the conference or a free expo pass.