In a recent post from James Quintana Pearce, MocoNews.net, he referenced a Gartner survey that indicated a lack of interest from Europeans in watching television or video on their mobile phones in the next 12 months. They cite “a lack of consensus on business models, variety of different technologies and shortage of airwaves” as reasons for the low response. He also noted a report from Juniper that indicated consumer interest may not be burgeoning, predicting 120 million mobile TV watchers worldwide by 2012, which will probably be less than 4 percent of the mobile phone user base.

I don’t really blame the survey respondents. Until the video viewing experience on mobile devices can compare to that of Internet video, it’s hard to disagree with their negative sentiment. However, demand is growing for a number of reasons cited in an IDC whitepaper, Internet and Mobile Video: Solutions for the Long Tail, which include better devices, faster networks, rising consumer awareness, price erosion and service bundling as well as the strong adoption of mobile TV and video among youth.

Right now however, the same content that consumers are used to accessing on their PCs isn’t rapidly being extended to mobile video. Why? Well, one reason is the complexity of delivering mobile video increases exponentially due to the variety of end-user devices: each with their own unique screen size, resolution, bit-rate and supported codecs. This generates unique challenges for media companies which are struggling to keep up with the increased amount of transcoding required to re-purpose video for the wide variety video-enable mobile devices on the market.

Take for example the iPhone. When Apple agreed to make YouTube content available via its iPhone, users expected to start searching the vast YouTube library of video immediately. However, all of that content has to be transcoded, or re-formatted to H.264, suitable for iPhone viewing. So slowly but surely all of the YouTube content is being made available to iPhone users. When users have the same ubiquitous access to video content from their mobile devices as they do from their PCs, that’s when adoption will really begin to climb.

As we move toward improving networks and devices, we’re simultaneously moving toward improving transcoding technology which is making viewing ubiquity possible and will vastly change the mobile video viewing experience for the better.