“A lot of the discussion around mobile TV centred around the vexed question of broadcasting spectrum and special technical standards and it all got very tangled - problems that haven’t been fully resolved, especially in Europe,” said MEF’s Bud. Technological strain has been a factor restricting the growth of broadcast television on mobiles, enabling swift-moving plug-ins to fill the gap. Telecoms group Crown Castle International closed down its effort to launch a broadcast mobile TV network in 2007. Phones and networks are in place in many countries, and watching it is very popular in countries such as South Korea where the service is aired for free.īut even there the wide takeup has not created a flourishing business, and in the United States it has been a hard slog. The biggest problem for mobile TV is that it emerged in 2004-2006, just when the media industry started to change.Ĭellphone makers and mobile operators have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the infrastructure. It’s also a little less stressful on the mobile networks.”Ī survey by KPMG and the MEF found that nearly 40 percent of consumers had at one time watched a piece of mobile video on their handset: 52 percent of them said the experience was satisfying, against 38 percent of a much smaller number of users who said they had tried broadcast mobile TV. “Mobile video is much more about video-on-demand. where the timing of the programming was set by the broadcaster and the consumer would dip in and dip out,” he said.
“Mobile TV is all about real-time, linear transmission.
He talks about mobile TV - which is broadcast - as opposed to mobile video, which you load onto your device. It’s an important distinction, says Andrew Bud, Chairman of the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF), a London-based trade association for the mobile media industry. “Application and widget stores and mobile internet access have taken priority over mobile broadcast.” SATISFACTION “We’ve downgraded our forecast a fair bit to reflect the slower-than-anticipated rollout of services and limited momentum from carriers and broadcasters,” said Strategy Analytics analyst Nitesh Patel. Only three years ago the firm forecast the market to reach $5.4 billion in 2010. Strategy Analytics now expects the mobile TV broadcasting market to total $280 million next year. Perhaps the best illustration of the fast-shifting outlook is the history of forecasts for the market. “This is mobile TV 2.0 - completely reinvented and redesigned, and I think it’s going to overtake the old models very very rapidly,” said Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of Livestation. A small venture, it is one of thousands of offerings from the likes of Apple, Nokia, RIM and many others letting users drive their mobile entertainment.īBC World and Al Jazeera English have recently launched apps for consumers to watch real-time news on their iPhones, through a London-based company, Livestation. The service they are using comes from a Web site which offers users the chance to send video from cellphones to their own TV channels on the Web. “It’s even easier than with still images, and a much nicer and expressive way to tell them the news from over here,” said David da Silva, spokesman for the team from Brazil. A youth tournament currently playing in the Finnish capital, it’s hardly a world event in the conventional sense.īut the video clips they are uploading from their phones will run on their parents’ mobiles or PCs back home. One way to see why not is to watch young Brazilian footballers knocking a soccer ball around in the Helsinki Cup. “It’s a nice product, but the customers won’t pay for it.” “It is a financial disaster,” said John Strand, a consultant who has followed the mobile industry closely for more than 12 years.
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