Manuela Davidson is the Mobile Executive Producer for ABC Innovation and has dedicated the past 12 years of her career to digital media, with a focus on online journalism, UGC, DTV and mobile projects.
In her current role she is helping the Australian Broadcasting Corporation understand where mobile audiences are heading to and how corporate strategies need to be realigned to respond to this shift in behaviour.
ABC Mobile Apps - including sneak peek at soon to be released new Android app
Australians are spending more time accessing the mobile internet than ever before. Internet usage in Australia is widespread, with 90% penetration (5th best in the world) and 81% of the population 16 years and above classified as active online users.
In 2011 something big happened … the number of smartphones sold exceeded the number of PC’s sold. In a few years the number of mobile phones being used will dwarf the number of PC’s and Tablet sales will also outpace PC’s. This will totally change how the world does business.
With this in mind we sat down to chat with Manuela Davidson about how ABC Mobile is doing, the issues they face and future trends for the creation and delivery of mobile content.
Davidson told us that initially ABC knew mobile was an exciting new platform which would eventually become a public broadcasting obligation so they started experimenting and learning about it early on. For the ABC mobile content delivery is both the biggest threat shifting audiences from other ABC outlets and biggest opportunity to offer content to a whole new audience that is growing fast.
Audience growth for ABC iView on iPad up to November 2011 (based on active users per month)
They must be on the right path because Australians love to access the ABC via mobile devices with continuous healthy audience growth for example ABC iView watching on tablets.
Mentioning some impressive audience growth numbers, Davidson said that for many people smartphones are the first computer they have used that makes it easy to access interactive video content.
This is reflected by spikes in ABC Mobile traffic every time a new big mobile device is launched and major holidays like Christmas when people often receive mobile devices as presents.
From a developers perspective, Davidson says it is difficult to plan ahead and deliver ABC Mobile applications with a consistent user experience to the vast variety of mobile device physical screen sizes, resolutions, processor speed capabilities and operating system (OS) capabilities.
A Common ABC Mobile Strategy has been drafted recently and is currently being reviewed to enable a whole of enterprise approach to bring mobile ideas to the mobile coordination group and share department resources wherever possible