According to M:Metrics, as of September 5.5 million people utilised BBC mobile services in some way - out of an estimated audience of 13.2M users/month using 'the mobile web'. This puts us as the 3rd highest mobile service in the UK. Of our users 80% are under the age of 45 and 15% of the users do not utilise other www.bbc.co.uk services.

Due to our size, this puts us in a unique situation in the UK. We are able to work directly with the network carriers - Primarily O2, Orange, T-Mobile, 3 and Vodafone; but with others as well - and major handset manufacturers to customise our services to work optimally. This has worked well for us as we've launched new services, like iPlayer on Mobile, over the last year; however, as new services come to market we will have a lot of work just to keep up with the changes around us.

To this end we are working with others in the market to help define a set of standards we can all work with to grow the marketplace. From the MEF site on this initiative, here are a summary of the objectives:
The MEF Enablers Initiative would have the overarching objective of promoting the most rapid implementation of a coherent, profitable and workable model for "smart pipe" enabling services, to the benefit of the entire mobile entertainment industry. Its ultimate objectives would include:

• The implementation by operators of a coherent and market-focused set of smart-pipe enabling services, based on standards which fully recognise the needs of the content community.
• The implementation of the "smart pipes" model by the large majority of operators, to ensure that the mobile entertainment community could rely on complete operator coverage in its core markets.
• The enthusiastic uptake of newly-available enabling services by content and service providers, so as to encourage operators to implement the broadest range of enabling services.

There will undoubtedly be other enabler services for other types of content, but for the BBC we are specifically interested in:

Location Services

• Knowing where a user is so as to serve appropriate content for the location, e.g. local news/weather/traffic
• Where we have upstream content right issues we need to properly set access rights for where you are

Quality of Service

• Can the network serve video to you where you are right now?
• For your location, what data rate can be sustained? This allows us to serve the right quality of content for you.
• Can we work with the carrier to provide you with a quality of service guarantee?

Common technology challenges

• Common interfaces across multiple providers/countries so as to avoid extra software development work
• Simplify the support matrix for the numerous devices we already support

Set cost expectations

• Are you on a data tariff?
• Will this activity cost you? If so how much - have us ask you in advance
• Avoid bill shock for you, the carrier and the content provider

In the end our goal is to find a way of working with others in the market to set standards we can all work with. In the end we aim to help grow the Mobile market in the UK and to provide better products to our audience as quickly as we can.

Mark Kortekaas is Controller, A&MI and Mobile, BBC Future Media & Technology.

So how does the audio get from the Royal Albert Hall into my FM/DAB/Internet Radio at home? And what happens to it along the way? How much is the audio in the Royal Albert Hall "dynamically compressed" (where the quiet bits get louder and the louder bits get quieter), and is any of the audio signal chucked away by using bandwidth limiting? And how might you get the best quality from our Proms coverage? I've always been interested in this; so here's what happens:

For Radio 3 transmission, on iPlayer and others...

Read more and comment at BBC Radio Labs blog.

At BBC Radio we try to deliver the best experience for users of our streaming services. We constantly review our services to make sure they deliver 'public value'. The four drivers of public value are: Reach, Quality, Impact and Value.

When streaming services are evaluated against these measures, we take into account where different formats might need to be implemented, evolved or deprecated.

The streaming service provided in RealMedia format has been with us at the BBC since 1996. At the time it was the best option available, but more recently alternative methods of delivery have become just as important. These include Windows Media and Flash.

When evaluating services with our public value tests, which includes the costs of the services, we came to the decision that RealMedia was something we needed to phase out.

Read the rest of this entry and leave your comments on the Radio Labs blog.

A couple of questions that came up that I would like to respond to:

Android:

We look at all major platforms and Android is clearly one that we are looking at. While we do not have anything on the formal roadmap as of today I hope that will change.

Downloading of Video to handsets:

This would be a great application to have so one can download content for viewing when out of range. Personally I would like the content for my 30+ minute daily tube ride. Our issue is simply how to properly protect and manage video content as we do with the iPlayer desktop. When we launched that product to PCs/Macs/Linux machines Anthony wrote a great summary of the DRM issues.

However, we are not standing by and are trying to figure out a solution to this that is viable with scale.

I'd like to thank everyone today for looking at what we've got going on and to my staff for pulling it all together. Despite the London Tube Strike today we all made it in, thankfully it is sunny out so the route diversions home will be more enjoyable.

Bye for now.

Mark Kortekaas is Controller, A&MI and Mobile, BBC Future Media & Technology