WH uses mobile to distribute Obama’s speeches

Posted: 12/04/09 by Mobile Future Team

Hats off to the White House for embracing mobile as a key communications tool in areas with minimal Internet access. A White House Blog post details the efforts of the White House and State Department New Media teams to ensure that Tuesday's speech by President Obama was made available to the Afghan people via mobile technology.

Looking at data on Whitehouse.gov, [there is not] a lot of traffic coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan because Internet penetration in the region is relatively low at 2% and 11% respectively. However, mobile penetration is much higher. 52% of the 177 million people in Pakistan have at least 1 mobile device and 30% of the 28.4 million in Afghanistan.  Given this trend, [the White House] produced short video clips of the President's segment to Afghans and had it dubbed in Arabic, Dari, Pashto, and Urdu in order for them to be distributed locally on mobile devices. Given the small screens on phones, subtitling wasn't an appropriate option. The original version in English is also available.