Nokia has recently announced that they are teaming up with Spike Lee to create a series of shorts for the User Generated Content community.

This is certainly a positive step for the handset maker who seem to  be seeking to extend into more diverse markets.

Certainly, UGC is huge and the goal of converting millions of eyeballs into dollars has been the Holy Grail for YouTube and a slew of smaller companies.

That Nokia is using their platforms; I gather the N95 along with a name director is certainly a good marketing strategy. Certainly, this is not the first company to seek to work from the top down.

Spike Lee Speaks

According to Mr. Lee, who has admitted to being technologically challenged,:

“I’m interested because it’s a great collaborative effort,” Mr. Lee said. “Within five years, new movies will be made with devices like these.”

I agree, but made by whom? A couple of years ago, Nokia had what I thought a killer platform for production, namely the N93 that unfortunately did not gain traction as was discontinued.

Nokia N93 Great For Shorts

While not consumer friendly enough, an updated version of the Nokia N93 would make a great little portable webcam platform for Indie producers for shorts, or even perhaps as a second unit camera for some projects.

John Stratton, the chief marketing officer of Verizon Communications who works closely with media companies to offer content to customers, said he did not expect films shot on phones to become their own genre. “But the notion of shared media is powerful.”

Fun Little Movies

Mr. Stratton should become acquainted with Fun Little Movies which has for the past several years done just that, creating and distributing shorts for the worldwide mobile handset market featuring accomplished actors such as Peter Dinklage.

There is also an elephant in the room that nobody is addressing, namely that U.S. cellular carriers restrict the amount of video content a user can upload to a site and in the case of AT&T, and it is 300kb per clip. 

If the goal of such collaborations between Nokia and Mr. Lee is to leverage the immediacy of mobile devices as more then simply smaller versions of existing cameras then the bandwidth will have to be opened to make it a more useful and rich user experience.

What About Indie Producers

While this is a good strategy for Nokia and Mr. Lee, what about Indie Producers? Talented Producers like Tiffany Shlain and accomplished shows like Alive in Baghdad would benefit greatly if they could strike deals with companies like Nokia or better yet gain traction with selling their content online?

A concern that many of us have with ITV in its current form is namely that it will become the platform for established media outlets and name directors to pitch their wares at the expense of smaller producers of varied backgrounds.

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[Content in whole or part adapted from IPTVe and is licensed under Creative Commons, no addition derivative works may be copied from this article without prior permission from IPTVe and Web TV Wire]

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