ThirdPresence: How to make sure your video plays on 5,000+ mobile devices

I’ve just come across a rather interesting service from ThirdPresence. Their service fixes a key nightmare for a lot of organisations: Getting video working on mobile devices.

Almost every modern mobile phone is capable of playing video. The problem is, they all play different formats and different resolutions. That’s why most people simply format their videos for iPhones and… screw-everybody-else.

Indeed, here at MIR we used to produce a Nokia N95-compatible video podcast stream. For a little while. It was such a flipping hassle I eventually stopped though.

With ThirdPresence, you simply upload your video to their system and boom… it’s done. That’s it. It’s ridiculously easy.

As a test, I uploaded an old video of Flirtomatic’s Mark Curtis accepting a recent MEF2010 award. It was processed and ready within just a few minutes.

Want to test it? Visit this page on your mobile device and you should be able to view the video:

Or visit directly by clicking this URL.

When I signed up for the service, I got to create a custom domain. I also got the option to text myself (or any mobile number) a simple URL that clicks through directly to play the video.

Interestingly, I tried this on a corporate BlackBerry Curve on OS 4.6 and the video didn’t work. It wanted to stream, but I think the corporate permissions have locked it down. (This is not an issue related to ThirdPresence.) The video played beautifully on a non-corporate-locked BlackBerry Bold 9780. And on the iPhone 4 I had to hand. Did it work for you?

ThirdPresence is elegantly designed — it was a piece of simplicity to use. And at $39/month for 10,000 minutes of delivered content, highly reasonable given the problem it solves.

If you’re trying to mobilise your video content, do take a look at ThirdPresence.