DROID: Yet another mobile platform on which you’ll want to put content.

The following post is written by Jonathan Cobb, CTO of our mobility and monetization solutions.

Last week, Verizon launched Motorola’s new Droid phone to much fanfare. According to Motorola, they sold 250,000 Droid smartphones in its first week, making it the most successful launch of an Android-based phone so far. And it certainly put Android on the map as a serious contender. Prior to the Droid launch, only smaller carriers like T-Mobile offered Android phones. Now the largest carrier in the US is putting all of its weight behind it, and it shows: Droid, in just short while on the market, already accounts for about one third of mobile video usage among Android phones.

So the big question to media publishers is: how will your video look on the Droid? Do you know if it even plays? Is the quality level the best it can be?

For publishers that have focused solely on the iPhone so far, making the jump to non-Apple devices can present a challenge. The sheer variety of screen sizes, operating system quirks, and video encoding parameters is truly staggering. Publishers who try to manage this chaos on their own quickly find themselves spending inordinate amounts of time playing catchup, contorting their publishing processes, and taking their focus away from where it should be - creating a compelling content experience for their audience, and growing that audience.

The LimelightREACH product was specifically designed to handle these inevitable events (and a whole lot more). Publishers using LimelightREACH didn’t have to change a thing. Their mobile websites didn’t have to change. The URLs to their videos on their mobile websites didn’t have to change. They never had to republish anything.

As if by magic, when a Droid user clicks to watch their video, the video plays, and it looks great. Which is exactly the user experience that every publisher wants their audience to have — it just works, no hassles.

With an ever-increasing number of handsets hitting the market in the coming months, Android and otherwise, this little adventure is bound to repeat itself ad naseum. Publishers who invest a little now in a scalable mobile video platform like LimelightREACH will reap huge operational efficiency rewards in the years to come.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 10:44 am and is filed under Content Delivery Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.