It's Audio First for Mobile

Following up one of my core beliefs about your mobile apps -- particularly those pitched at the smart phone -- it is all about streaming audio into that market. More research to back that up from none other than Akamai.

Here's the key takeaway bullet:

On tablets & smartphones, online audio, e-mail, software downloads, and social networking traffic are big consumers of 3G data traffic

What was first on that list? "Online audio"

What is the copyright you are most likely to hang onto (or at least your conference or other major television rights holder won't take)? Audio

Interesting within this for the app area: Akamai reporting one of the real growth segments is streaming video into the mobile 3G environment. I find that particularly vindicating after listening to the sales rep of a major provider for college websites proclaim with too much false confidence that "no one will ever watch more than five minutes" of video on a portable device at a time.

Oh, BTW, who is Akamai? They are the heavy lifting back end delivery company for almost all of your streamed video. Think of them as the AT&T of streaming -- long distance, industrial through put. In other words, they by God know what is and what's coming, because they are the company that the college website companies hire to do their streaming.