July 28, 2010

By By Antony Bruno

Brooklyn punk/hip hop outfit the Lordz have become the first band to utilize a relatively new video sharing technology called Thwapr. With it, the band can post videos to their website which fans can then send to their friends mobile phone. The ?Share to Phone? feature works much like a Facebook ?like? button. Fans simply click on the share icon, enter their friends? phone numbers, and Thwapr sends the video to the various phones.

Thwapr hosts the videos and formats it to best suit each phone, such as for things like screen size and resolution. In most cases, users will stream the video from the Thwapr site, but users can download files as well if streaming is not supported.

Thwapr provides similar services for the Vans Warped Tour and the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival. During each event, attendees can request to have highlight videos sent to their phone by sending the request to the Thwapr shortcode. And the company hopes to see more uses of the technology by providing it to mobile app developers interested in adding it to their products going forward.

The idea behind it all is to circumvent some of the problems in transmitting video content between phones, particularly when using the MMS multimedia messaging format. While MMS is a standard format for multimedia messaging, the way content sent through it is not always rendered the same way due to device incompatibility and the way different operators transmit video. For instance the video may not take up the full screen of the device, and in some cases the length of video may be limited to as low as 30 seconds.

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