Abstract

Nearly forty years after the commercial launch of mobile phones in the late 1970s, mobile video is one of the most common and culturally significant uses of the technology. Since the invention of camera phones in the early 2000s—and the extended data capacities of third- (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) mobile networks—a defining characteristic of mobile media has been the prevalence of video and other kinds of moving pictures. A crude measurement of this is found in Internet networking company Cisco’s measurement that mobile video traffic exceeded 50 percent of all mobile data traffic for the first time in 2011—and that mobile video will increase sixteen-fold between 2012 and 2017, reaching a predicted two-third share. ¹