Last week, I was at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where I gave a talk on web and mobile video to students in the Computer Science Department.   In our industry, we often get all wrapped up in attending conferences and reading blogs from industry analysts; sometimes we need to remember that the real target users of the stuff that we build can be found hanging around on university campuses.   This trip was part of my effort to connect with the folks who will be using the software that our team is developing, and I took advantage of the crowd to do a little bit of market research.

Besides talking about Dialogic's video technology (and sharing some general industry anecdotes and gossip), I asked the students about their favorite sites for watching "professionally produced" web video.  (I was not really interested in the user-generated videos that seem to provide such a large portion of the content available on YouTube, but rather sites at which users could watch full-length, professionally-produced content.)   We spoke about hulu and veoh; in addition, I spoke about surfthechannel, an aggregation site that provides a single global portal for users to select a variety of content, including television shows, sports, even anime.  I also mentioned primetimerewind.tv, a startup company (co-founded by my friend Jeff Pulver) focused on providing a single location where viewers can watch "prime time" shows from a variety of networks.

Besides talking about web-based video, we spoke about the students' experiences with watching video on mobile devices.  In my previous post here, I spoke about watching an episode of "The Office" on my LG Voyager from Verizon Wireless.  When asked, more than half the students in the crowd had video-enabled mobile phones, and most claimed that they "often" watch video content on their mobile device.

My biggest surprise of the evening, however, came when I asked the students about their preferred method for watching "television shows" - I certainly expected the students to talk about the ease of watching shows on the web at their convenience, or the freedom that comes from watching their favorites when mobile.  Surprisingly, the overwhelming response to my question was that they preferred to watch television shows "on a television set."  As one student put it, "There's nothing quite like a 42-inch plasma."

To those of us in the industry, comments such as this just confirm the need for video content to be available for "three screens" - television set, laptop screen, and mobile device.  To the technologist, this can lead to detailed discussions about the need for transcoding and transrating algorithms to groom the video content for proper display.  However, the real users of this stuff - the students in that classroom - really don't want to hear about the technology.   They just want an assurance that the video content they want to view can be delivered with high quality at any time, in any format, on any device.  I guess we'll be busy for a while.