Quality standards for in-app video ads enters the zone of irony and myth
Current theoretical advances in quality for mobile video ads are supported by the waitlist of brands and publishers wanting to get on the mobile video train and is probably well worth hundreds of millions of dollars. These advances in theory are many but they are simplified by what is current in technology and what should be ideal for a mass consumer base that has abnormally high standards of quality.
First, we must explore why these abnormally high standards exist. They do because online video or mobile video consumers have been taught to do so. They have been educated this way because online companies are competing with each other to expand the envelope of online and mobile video and nothing but the best promises will do in this regard. Second, the technology platforms are merely waiting for better definition, faster delivery and interoperability across a spectrum of devices, current and projected.
However, quality is a snowy peak that is still waiting to be conquered. It is the consumer hunger for TV-quality video experience on mobile devices that is going to be satisfied sooner or later, if all the market predictors are to be believed. The quality indicators are obvious but have encountered technological paradoxes in their development. (There should be a model for technological irony that is on the verge of not delivering what is expected of it, when the limits of possibility for a system are pushed into the corner of impossibility with conflicting and unmixable requirements.)
Large video files cannot readily fit the mobile environment but they are important for HD and TV-quality videos. Downsizing files however has come into a calculable limit for mobile devices. One non-technological way to do it is to have shorter ads than TV. (Well, forget about having the TV-like experience that everyone hungers for.) It has been discovered in a related study how 15-second video ads are actually better for audience engagement in the mobile field. So the standards for TV will no longer apply. And there is the ever-present storage and power problems – mobile devices cannot have the endurance and the strength of the Energizer Bunny, and files are severely limited where storage is concerned. And so on and so forth. The situation’s built-in paradox might kill off the high level of interest in mobile devices sooner rather than later. The quality level for in-app video ads has been over-projected at fever pitch, but people are as quick to abandon products that don’t live up to their promises as quickly as they took them in. Remember the Macintosh? What, you ask. Well, it was a “revolutionary” PC that is in a bin somewhere in consumer memory – and no one ever visits it any more.