So imagine you’re waiting for a train and you’re reading an article about your favorite sports star’s walk off homer in the big game last night. There’s a url at the bottom of the article that allows you to access more information about the story, but you’re nowhere near a computer.

In South Korea, all you’ll have to do is hold your phone against the code and it will access a video feed of the game’s highlights so you can watch it right there. This is the latest technology offered by Ico, one of the leading mobile content providers in Korea and a subsidiary of For-side.com, a top Japanese tech company.

For now, the content delivery is tied through a joint venture with a newspaper, the Daily Focus, but one has to wonder how much longer it will be before video over WAP becomes the standard rather than the exception. And when that happens have we lost one more barrier to our personal space?

The power of connectivity is important to understand. It can make people incredibly efficient, allowing them to multi-task on a level never before imagined. But there’s still the issue of contact “quality”- how much do we give up in one-on-one quality time in order to satisfy our need for mass quantities of media?

Ico is aiming to sign up more than 200,000 users, presumably by years’ end. In a country like South Korea, where mobile phone penetration is very high and the populations in metro areas are extremely dense, that seems like a very achievable number. But we should watch carefully to see how much “new market” this kind of innovation creates and how much “old” marketshare it takes from rivals like newspaper, radio and television.

Later.

For-side.com Sub Ico to Launch Video-on-demand Mobile News Service in South Korea

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