Sharing the Experience with Mobile Video: A Student Community Trial

To understand the technical feasibility and user perception of mobile video, we conducted a two-week trial where a student community used mobile phone and Web technologies to share the events of a campus festival. The questions we investigated included the capability of contemporary smart phones to capture and share the events via real time and stored video; the usage patterns that arise within mobile video community; and the social connections between shooters and viewers. Outcomes on the technical level indicate that challenges remain. The bandwidth of 3G cellular connections limits the quality of live videos and video transfer via public WLAN networks is unreliable causing lost connections. The best results today can be achieved by sending the captured videos from mobile phones to the server in the background and providing video-on-demand rather than live video service. The observed consumption patterns show that freshness of the videos is the least important selection factor while manual and automatic textual tagging is important. Seamless integration of video sharing to camera application would improve the user experience.