What is Mobile Video Streaming?

Mobile video streaming is the practice of providing video to a mobile device through wireless digital signals. This fairly new kind of technology has been applied to mobile phone and cell phone devices, as well as to some other kinds of wireless devices that can receive digital broadband signals through the air. Video streaming media is now quickly becoming part of what customers expect from a mobile device, and electronics companies are racing to deliver a greater variety of traveling devices that will showcase the ability to stream digital video.

The idea of mobile video streaming developed from digital connections to wired devices fairly quickly, as the Internet and other connective technologies emerged in the 1990s. Providers of digital video began to offer them through broadband connections. Wider broadband services helped to provide a better standard for video streaming. Eventually, the improvement of digital video transfer meant it could be applied to less stable systems like wireless networks, which were also conveniently becoming more stable through more finely tuned information delivery processes.

Mobile video streaming has some of the same conventions that were always associated with receiving video through digital connection. One of these is “buffering,” in which the digital display has to temporarily stop in order to help the receiving technology catch up with receiving and ordering all of the digital data in the video production. Another has to do with formatting, where videos and nonstandard formats may not have the same kinds of accessibility as video in established formats like MPEG-4, a common video format for mobile streaming.

Many of today’s digital service providers use a 3G Network, a kind of certified wireless signal that provides helpful standards for the wireless community as a whole. Customers can compare the 3G networks of competing mobile content providers, and choose the one they think will best accommodate their desired use of mobile content, including TV or live video streaming. Companies are also developing 4G networks for the future, which would logically include better accommodation for mobile video streaming.

As various kinds of technology have improved through the last several decades, the operational capacity of consumer electronics has exploded. Mobile video streaming is a good example of this phenomenon, where full length movies and quality video content can now be sent through wireless signal directly to an end user. Technicians and engineers continue to study the common uses of 3G and 4G networks to see how the current system can be improved for even better mobile video streaming and delivery in the future.