I’ll be speaking at the upcoming IT Expo West show in Las Vegas on August 27, where one of the topics I’ll be presenting on is, “How to make video part of your mobile strategy.” Mobile video is one of the most significant parts of the smartphone experience. YouTube’s most recent statistics report shows that mobile viewership makes up more than 25 percent of its global watch time, with more than one billion views a day. On certain carrier networks, mobile video traffic is responsible for as much as 70 percent of all mobile traffic, according to ByteMobile analysis. Further, the average iPad user generates three times the data traffic that an iPhone subscriber does.

I hate to break it to the service provider community, but if you haven’t included mobile video as a significant part of your overall service provider video strategy, you are already losing out – on subscriber loyalty, on new revenue streams, and that’s only the beginning. If you are a carrier, then offering smartphones that operate over LTE must be a key part of that. If you haven’t started an LTE rollout on your network, or if your LTE network is experiencing congestion due to high demand, then implementing network optimization solutions will help – but that’s only one part of the strategy. Offering more mobile value-added services must be a priority, because otherwise, all we’re talking about is the physical act of moving video through the mobile internet pipe. The real revenue generator and area of competition is enabling and developing new mobile video apps for the user.

At IT Expo, I’ll be talking along with other mobile video experts about how providers can enable value-added services around mobile video. Developers must factor mobile video applications into any value-added service roadmap just to stay competitive. The good news is, there is better technology available to enable the further development of these apps.

In the past, a separate video client would need to be downloaded to the phone in order to run apps such as SIP video. The apps were created using a physical media server that supported video. But today, developers are looking to replace that old way by using software-based, WebRTC-enabled media servers. These new media servers are more cost-effective, take up less space in an apps dev lab, and help developers speed up the developing, testing and proof of concept cycles. WebRTC clients will be “shipped” with your browser – at least your Chrome or Firefox browser – so the best way to enable a video value-added service is to build the service with a WebRTC-enabled and video-enabled media server, and utilizing WebRTC clients.