A fuzzy picture
"THIS is a really exciting time-a new era is starting," says Peter Bazalgette, the chief creative officer of Endemol, the television company behind "Big Brother" and other popular shows. He is referring to the upsurge of interest in mobile television, a nascent industry at the intersection of telecoms and media which offers new opportunities to devicemakers, content producers and mobilenetwork operators.
Already, many mobile operators offer a selection of television channels or individual shows, which are "streamed" across their thirdgeneration (3G) networks. In South Korea, television is also sent to mobile phones via satellite and terrestrial broadcast networks, which is far more efficient than sending video across mobile networks. In Europe, the Italian arm of 3, a mobile operator, recently acquired Canale 7, a television channel, with a view to launching mobileTV broadcasts in Italy in the second half of 2006.
Meanwhile, Apple Computer, which launched a videocapable version of its iPod portable musicplayer in October, is striking deals with television networks to expand the range of shows that can be purchased for viewing on the device, including "Lost", "Desperate Housewives" and "Law & Order".
Despite all this activity, however, the prospects for mobile TV are unclear. For a start, nobody really knows if consumers will pay for it, though surveys suggest they like the idea. Informa, a consultancy, says there will be 125m mobileTV users by 2010. But many other mobile technologies inspired high hopes and then failed to live up to expectations. And even if people do want TV on the move, there is further uncertainty in two areas: technology and business models.
At the moment, mobile TV is mostly streamed over 3G networks. But sending an individual data stream to each viewer is inefficient and will be unsustainable in the long run if mobile TV takes off. So the general consensus is that 3G streaming is a prelude to the construction of dedicated mobileTV broadcast networks, which transmit digital TV signals on entirely different frequencies to those used for voice and data. There are three main standards: DVBH, favoured in Europe; DMB, which has been adopted in South Korea and Japan; and MediaFLO, which is being rolled out in America. Watching TV using any of these technologies requires a TVcapable handset, of course.
In contrast, watching downloaded TV programmes on an iPod or other portable video player is already possible today. And unlike a programme streamed over 3G or broadcast via a dedicated mobileTV network, shows stored on an iPod can be watched on an underground train or in regions with patchy network coverage. That suggests that some shows (such as drama) better suit the download model, while others (such as live news, sports or reality shows) are better suited to realtime transmission. The two approaches will probably coexist.
Just as there are several competing mobileTV technologies, there are also many possible business models. Mobile operators might choose to build their own mobileTV broadcast networks; or they could form a consortium and build a shared network; or existing broadcasters could build such networks.
The big question is whether the broadcasters and mobile operators can agree how to divide the spoils, assuming there are any. Broadcasters own the content, but mobile operators generally control the handsets, and they do not always see eye to eye. In South Korea, a consortium of broadcasters launched a freetoair DMB network last month, but the country's mobile operators were reluctant to provide their users with handsets able to receive the broadcasts, since they were unwilling to undermine the prospects for their own subscriptionbased mobileTV services.
Then there is the question of who will fund the production of mobileTV content: broadcasters, operators or advertisers? Again, the answer is probably "all of the above".
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