Media Contents in Mobiles

Mobile phones are developing more and more into versatile multipurpose multimedia devices with good video display facilities (May & Hearn 2005: 195-196). The video functionality makes it possible for users to view and create video clips, make video calls and follow news and other TV broadcasts in real time. Mobile phones can handle a variety of different media contents, and the mobile phone has become a medium used for various forms of personal, community and mass communication. Mass communication content is increasingly available in personal mobile applications, which contributes to blurring of traditional boundary between personal and mass communication. Of course, there are still many questions related to the user experiences and user requirements of mobile TV news and other media services. Users' preferences for the different uses of mobile media are being studied from various viewpoints. For example mobile television has been studied by users' content choices (Södergård 2002, Knoche 2005), viewing context and viewing times (Plodere & Obrist, 2006, Mäki 2005) and video quality requirements (Knoche 2005; Jumisko-Pyykkö 2006). In an ongoing research project, we turned around the question of how interesting users find mobile television content in general, and asked instead, what media presentation type - text, audio or video - users would choose, if they had the opportunity to make a choice. With this approach, we hope to gain new insight into users' requirements and expectations of mobile media contents.