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In the early 1980s in the USA, filmcompanies fought to suppress the spread of mass-market video recorders,fearing that copyright violations would damage their business. Theyfailed, but in the years that followed they found that video recordingsof their products had become a major source of income. In the twentyfirst century, the convergence of technologies described above permitsan unlimited number of copies of media content to be produced anddistributed globally for very little cost. Traditional media distributors arechallenged and again the content owners are understandably concernedabout copyright infringement.
Newspapers and magazines are beingreplaced by websites. CD and DVD sales are being replaced by Internetstreaming, downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing. Combined with this,the new technologies have also seeded a very rapidly growing trend insocial networking and consumer-generated content.4INTRODUCTIONThe primary tools for creating and consuming this content are convergence devices. Sales of camera phones exceeded those of dedicateddigital cameras in 2003. The world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer,Nokia, is also the largest manufacturer of digital cameras and musicplayers. In Japan, 90% of digital music sales are on mobile devices,while South Korea has become the first market where digital sales haveovertaken physical music sales.According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers Global Entertainment andMedia Outlook 2007–2011,1 digital and mobile spending in the sector will rise to $153 billion in 2011, by which time spending relatedto the distribution of entertainment and media on convergent platforms(convergence of the home computer, wireless handset and television) willexceed 50% of the global total.
It should be noted that smartphones arenot the only ‘convergent platforms’, although they do account for a largevolume of such devices. To provide some more mobile-specific figures,Juniper Research predicts total mobile music revenues – including ringtones and ringback tones2 – to rise from around $9.3 billion in 2007 tomore than $17.5 billion by 2012, with much of that growth coming fromfull track downloads. Additionally, Juniper expects mobile TV, broadcastand streamed, to experience spectacular revenue growth from just under$1.4 billion in 2007 to nearly $12 billion by 2012. The projected risein spending on downloads of music to mobile devices is illustrated byFigure 1.2, with figures taken from the 2008 Netsize Guide.3A lot of the revenue generated will belong to the content owners butthe shifting landscape, combined with the rapidly increasing numberof smartphones,4 will produce plenty of opportunities to develop newservices and business models.
New companies and brands can grow andmarket share is likely to shift between established brands as everyonecompetes for the attention of the mobile consumer. One great weaponin that competition is the ability to provide an optimal experience forthe end user with a customized client or player application. To this end,Symbian empowers developers by providing the means to extend andenhance the features of the latest smartphones with applications andutilities. The part of Symbian OS concerned with multimedia contentcreation and consumption, known as the multimedia subsystem, is thesubject of the rest of this book.1 See www.pwc.com/extweb/ncpressrelease.nsf/docid/E042C329AE028974852573010051F342.2 In Asia, ringback tones are provided by a popular subscription service: users select themusic that is heard by callers while they’re waiting for an answer.3See www.netsize.com.4Cumulative sales are forecast to pass the 1 billion mark by 2011 according to both theYankee Group and Canalys (www.symbian.com/about/fastfacts.html ).SYMBIAN OS5$18,000Africa & Middle East$16,000Rest of Asia Pacific$14,000$12,000India Sub Continent$10,000China & Far East$8,000$6,000Eastern Europe$4,000Western Europe$2,000South America$0200720082009North America201020112012Source: Juniper ResearchFigure 1.2 Total user-generated revenues ($M) from mobile music (forecast for 2007–12)1.3 Symbian OSSymbian creates and licenses Symbian OS, the market leading, openoperating system for mobile phones.
It’s not the only smartphone operating system you can target with multimedia applications and services butit is by far the most popular. According to Canalys,5 in 2007, Symbianhad a 67% share of the market for converged device operating systems(Canalys combines smartphones with other wireless handhelds in theirstatistics). For comparison, next in the list was Microsoft with 13%.Symbian does not make smartphones itself, but works with its licensees,which number the world’s largest handset manufacturers.
Those thatshipped Symbian smartphones in Q4 2007 are Fujitsu, LG Electronics,Motorola, Mitsubishi Electric, Nokia, Samsung, Sharp and Sony Ericsson.As of June 2008, these licensees have shipped over 235 different models based on Symbian OS. Sales of these smartphones are acceleratingrapidly; it took eight years to ship the first 100 million Symbian smartphones and only a further 18 months to ship the next 100 million.With global mobile phone shipments now well over 1 billion a year5 Seewww.canalys.com/pr/2008/r2008021.htm.6INTRODUCTIONand Symbian OS providing new features to enable manufacturers totarget mid-range, as well as high-end, products, that growth looks set tocontinue for some time to come.For handset manufacturers, Symbian OS enables rapid integration withnew device platforms, via a large ecosystem of hardware and softwareproduct and service provider partners.
An application developer canget access to the new capabilities of the platform using the open APIsprovided by Symbian and its partners. This powerful combination haskept Symbian OS smartphones at the forefront of mobile multimedia sincethe turn of the millennium.Furthermore, as we prepare to take this book to press in June 2008,Symbian is transforming into the Symbian Foundation, to create an openand complete mobile software platform, which will be available for free.The Symbian Foundation will unify Symbian OS and its UI platforms, S60,UIQ and MOAP(S), to create an open software platform for convergedmobile devices, enabling the whole mobile ecosystem to accelerate innovation. Further information is available from www.symbianfoundation.org .1.4 The Cutting EdgeThe first year of the new millennium was also the year the first everSymbian smartphone went on sale.
The Ericsson R380, as it was called,was the size of a standard phone but the keyboard folded back to reveala touchscreen. It combined a mobile phone with a number of personalorganization tools, including an address book, a calendar, email, voicememo and a note pad. These had previously been found in PDAssuch as the Psion Series 5, which was built on an earlier version ofSymbian OS. However, the R380 was ‘closed’ which means that noadditional applications could be installed to the phone.
The operatingsystem supported the installation of aftermarket software, but it was notpermitted on this device.In 2001, we saw the launch of the first open Symbian smartphone,the Nokia 9210 Communicator. It was basically just a PDA and a mobilephone in a single package, aimed at high-end business users. Apartfrom a web browser, it shipped with very little multimedia functionality.However, thanks to the open, programmable nature of Symbian OS,third-party application developers rushed to fill the void and, within afew months, music and video players were available for the device.
Thesame year also saw the launch of the first smartphone with a camera,the Nokia 7650. The digital camera and smartphone combined into oneTHE CUTTING EDGE7device was marketed as an ‘imaging phone’. For reference, 2001 wasalso the year that Apple launched the first iPod.The second half of 2002 saw Archos release the first portable mediaplayer (PMP) and this was closely followed by the launch of the SonyEricsson P800 with a touchscreen, camera and support for many popularmultimedia formats as well as streaming video from the Internet directto the mobile device.
Around the same time, the first PDA with built-inpersonal navigation functionality via GPS was released. In 2003, Motorolalaunched their first Symbian smartphone, the A920, which included builtin assisted GPS and fast 3G network access, as well as rich multimediafunctionality.In 2004, we had increasing processing power, storage space andcamera resolutions in our Symbian smartphones, as well as built-in 3Dgraphics engines. It’s worth pausing to note that the cutting edge ofgraphics, although related to multimedia, is usually driven by gamedevelopment.
There is a separate graphics subsystem in Symbian OS anda separate book6 that covers it – it is not discussed further in this book.There was a landmark for mobile multimedia in 2005 with the launchof Nokia’s Nseries range,7 described as ‘multimedia computers’.
Withcamera resolutions ranging from two to five megapixels in the latest models, many with branded Carl Zeiss optics and some having auto-focus andeven optical zoom capability, these devices are credible alternatives to adedicated digital camera for all but the serious photography enthusiast orprofessional.
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