1 Trafficking: Design for the Viral Exchange of Digital Content on Mobile Phones

In this paper, we report the user research background to, the design of and eventual fate of an integrated solution to the downloading and sharing, via Bluetooth, of broadcast TV content on mobile phones. In particular, we report, first of all, the discovery of emerging social practices involving the exchange of multimedia content on mobiles that we label ‘trafficking’. Second, the iteration of a design solution to extend these practices to include the trafficking of broadcast TV content ‘segments’. Third, the implications this had for basic assumptions in the interaction design afforded by the two primary OS’s in the mobile handset domain. And then, fourth, the legal and business inhibitors-enablers that affected not only this research but which are likely to affect all attempts to stretch the capacity of mobile devices and mobile interaction design to afford new ways of ‘trafficking ’ multimedia content, especially content subject to digital rights management Author Keywords Mobile devices, mobile TV, trafficking, content genre