Mobile TV Possible Without 3G or Mobile Broadcast Networks

According to a new market research published this week by Analysys Mason, mobile operators should look at the alternatives to delivering TV content to mobile devices, using WiFi and sideloading (transfer of content to a mobile device through a PC). Research on mobile TV has shown that many people use the service in their homes, where broadband network connectivity is available, and content can be loaded directly to mobile devices using WiFi, or sideloaded from a PC over Bluetooth or USB. Accessing Mobile TV content in this manner enables higher quality, less waiting time, and a challenge to mobile operator business models.

ABI Research: 462 Mobile TV Subscribers by 2012

According to a new market research report published by ABI Research, the number of global subscribers to Mobile TV services is expected to reach 462 million by 2012, driven mainly by the expansion of 3G network deployment, and flat-rate pricing plans. ABI Research sees Asia-Pacific as the region with the most prominent growth, expanding from 24 million subscribers in 2007 to more than 260 million in 2012.

It is interesting to compare these figures with the recent findings in a report titled "Mobile TV in Asia", published by the Cable & Satellite Broadcast Association of Asia, as reported in TelevisionPoint. According to the CSBAA report, the number of mobile TV subscribers in Asia will increase from 15 million in 2007 to 76.3 million in 2012, out of 156 million global subscribers. The most probable explanation for this difference is that the CSBAA report refers to Mobile Broadcast TV subscribers only, while the ABI Research report refers to total Mobile TV subscribers, including both cellular networks and mobile broadcast networks.

French Mobile TV Subscribers Reach 1.2M

According to ScreenDigest, the number of mobile TV subscribers in France as of December 207 has reached 1.2 million. At the Telecom 2007 conference in Paris, Orange France reported a total of 1 million mobile TV subscribers, while SFR claimed to have 200,000 mobile TV subscribers. ScreenDigest notes that both cellular operators have witnesses a subscriber growth of 40% in the last quarter, driven by the launch of unlimited data, video, TV and music plans.

Screen Digest: 140M Mobile TV Subscribers by 2011

According to a new market research report titled "Mobile TV: Business Models and Opportunities" published by Screen Digest, there will be 140M mobile TV subscribers worldwide by 2011, and global revenues will reach 4.4B Euros. However, the report states that in the short term network operators are not expected to make much profit from the mobile TV services.

In terms of business models, the report predicts that free to air services, that currently drive customer growth in Asia, will not be popular elsewhere since the business model behind these services is not proven. Therefore, 90% of the revenues in 2011 will come from subscription-based services.

Mobile TV Subscriber Forecast Breaks 2B Mark

According to a new market research report published by Telecom Trends International, the number of global mobile TV users will grow from 20 million today to over 2 billion by 2013. As far as I recall, this is the highest subscriber number forecast published by a market research firm to date. The previous record was set by ABI Research, who predicted last year that the global number of mobile TV users will grow to 514M by 2011.

The Telecom Trends International report also sets a record for mobile TV revenues, predicting that by 2013 the global revenues from mobile TV will reach $134.5B. This figure is more than 10 times higher than any other mobile TV revenue figure published by market research firms in the past.

The Ups and Downs of Mobile TV

Mobile TV has always been a controversial issue. The big players who sell handsets, network equipment and mobile services, keep taking the optimistic side, and pushing the analysts in that direction. On the other hand, there are always people who ask "Who would like to view TV on a a tiny screen, and pay for it?". In the last few weeks it seems that the debate is shifting more to the negative side, especially when discussing subscription-based mobile TV services.

Still on the optimistic side, Juniper Research is predicting that the number of users who receive mobile broadcast TV services will increase from 12M in 2007 to 120M by 2012, with service revenues expected to exceed $6.6B. And France is pushing forward with the introduction of Mobile TV services in the summer of 2008, just in time for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

The launch of DVB-H in France during 2008 follows the introduction of DVB-H in Italy during the 2006 Soccer World Cup, and in Finland during 2007. While the Italian service enjoyed a high adoption rate initially, the latest reports show that service uptake has flattened. And the service in Finland was stalled for several months due to the lack of compatible handsets and compelling content. The situation in Europe is quite inline with Gartner's recent survey, which found that only 5 percent of European subscribers are interested in watching video or TV on their phones.

Industry analysts have also shifted their positions in view of the market situation, demonstrated by the discontinuation of mobile TV services offered by Virgin and BT Movio in the UK, and by Modeo in the USA. The EE Times says that Mobile TV chip makers "struggles to hold on", as the market has proven successful only in countries that offer free-to-air broadcasts (Japan and Korea). Stephen Wellman from Information Week asks "When Will Anyone Actually Watch Mobile TV?", claiming that small screens and poor marketing have probably killed the service, although service providers in the USA don't reveal any numbers.

Mike Masnik at TechDirt writes about "The Ongoing Blind Belief In Mobile Broadcast TV", stating that mobile users don't have the time for watching broadcast TV programs, and would prefer short video clips on demand instead. He also says that people can broadcast their own TV from home, and watch it on their mobile device using a SlingBox and an unlimited data plan, meaning they don't have to pay mobile operators for such services. Indeed, the introduction of SlingPlayer Mobile for SymbinOS is likely to be a disruptive move in this direction. Russel Shaw at ZDNet takes the same position, claiming that "Mobile TV is So Overhyped".

So what's your take on the future of mobile TV, and in particular subscription-based Mobile Broadcast TV services? Please comment on this post to voice your opinion.

DVB-H Information in Hebrew

Orange Israel has an excellent website about the history and future of communications, which explains many technologies and buzzwords in mobile and wireless communication in simple terms, using beautiful flash animations. On the website you can find information in Hebrew about DVB-H, GPS, NFC, H.264, MIMO, and many others.

80M Mobile Broadcast TV Subscribers by 2011

eMarketer published a new market research report this week, predicting that by 2011, 80M users worldwide will pay for mobile broadcast TV services. It is interesting to compare this forecast with the data from In-Stat published on the same day, predicting 125M mobile broadcast TV users worldwide by 2011 (however, this number may include free mobile TV services as well). Another interesting comparison would be with eMarketer's own research from last year, which predicted 100M mobile broadcast TV subscribers by 2009.

eMarketer is also forecasting that by 2011, an additional 120M users will pay for mobile video and TV services delivered over cellular networks, and that the total number of mobile video and TV users, including both paid and free services, will increase from 40M users in 2006 to 754M users in 2011.

In terms of revenues, eMarketer is forecasting a total revenue of $12.7B for mobile video and TV services, comprising of $5B from cellular video and TV services, and $7.7B from mobile broadcast TV subscription.

Study: Virgin DAB-IP Mobile TV Beats Vodafone 3G TV service

A new study published by Strategy Analytics found that users preferred Virgin's Mobile TV service based on DAB-IP technology, to Vodafone's cellular TV service. The study found a large preference to DAB-IP in perceived network performance and usability, but only a slight advantage in audiovisual quality and content. In the overall rating, Virgin's service received 70 points, while the Vodafone service was awarded 50 points.

Another study by Startegy Analytics found that the "Tua" DVB-H mobile TV service by 3 Italy was the easiest to buy and the best to use, beating TIM Italy's DVB-H service and Vodafone's UMTS mobile TV service.

BBC and SKY Lead UK Mobile TV Rating Chart

A new research published by Telephia found that 33% of mobile TV viewers in the UK watch BBC 1, 29% watch Sky Sports, and 24% watch the Discovery Channel. Next on the list are BBC 2, BBC 3, BBC 4 and ITV 1 with 22% each. However, overall penetration of mobile TV services in the UK remains low: According to Telephia, only 3% of all mobile subscribers in the UK watch mobile TV or video content.

UPDATE: The Inquirer posted an item titled "Telephia's mobile TV research begs channel questions", claiming that BBC1 is only available on Virgin's DAB-IP service which still has very limited adoption, and BBC2, BBC and BBC4 are not available at all on mobile phones. Telephia posted a clarification on their website, stating that their statistics include all TV delivery formats, including live streaming, on-demand streaming and downloaded video clips.

New Mobile TV Handsets

According to a new report by ABI Research, penetration of mobile TV handsets in Japan and Korea is increasing, with over 14% of Korean handsets already supporting mobile broadcast TV. In the past two weeks, we have witnessed a flood of mobile TV device announcements originating in South East Asia. Here are some examples:

• LG launched a slim mobile TV phone, less than 11 mm thick.
• Samsung announced two "ultra-slim" mobile TV handsets, the SCH-B510 which supports S-DMB and the SPH-B5100 which supports T-DMB.
• Samsung also announced the SCH-B560, a rotating-screen T-DMB handset.
• The SCH-B600, Samsung's new 10-Megapixel camera phone, includes an S-DMB receiver.
• Motorola announced a satellite DMB phone for the Korean market called "Moto View".
• Taiwanese handset vendor Gigabyte announced the GSmart i200 handset, a DVB-H device running Windows Mobile 5.0, and featuring a VGA display. The handset includes a mobile TV receiver chip by Siano Mobile Silicon, and DVB-H client software by Panthera.
• Another handset powered by the Siano receiver was unveiled by by Chinese ODM TechFaith Wireless. The handset is a dual-mode mobile TV phone, supporting T-DMB, DAB-IP and DVB-H.
  

Other recent announcements of mobile TV devices include a navigator and a PDA by LG, and a PMP by Korean vendor Yukyung Technology.

Mobile TV Market Forecast Roundup - Take 2

A few months ago, I posted an item which summarized the results of several mobile TV market research reports. In the past few weeks, we have been flooded again by numerous market research reports describing the current status and the future prospects of Mobile TV. And yet again, the numbers and opinions are highly varied, ranging from total lack of interest in this service to full-blown, mass-market user adoption.

Most optimistic of all is IMS Research, which forecasted that 446 million people will be watching TV on their cell phones by 2011. This forecast was characterized by Digital-Lifestyles as over-optimistic, in their post "446m Mobile Phones TV User By 2011? We Consider", and was also challenged by TelecomWeb's Wireless Business Forecast, with the headline "446M Mobile-TV Viewers By 2011: Who Makes These Numbers?". Juniper Research also joined the optimistic camp, forecasting $11.7B worldwide revenues for Mobile TV, lead by the US and Japan.

On the more pessimistic side, a poll by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg found that only 14% of young adults and teenagers in the US were interested in watching TV on their cellular phones. This directly contradicts a recent market research by Quaestor, which found that 87% of 10-12 year old children in the UK would like to watch TV on their cellular phones - is the cultural difference that big?

Still in the UK, Paul Trotter posted a column in PC Pro stating "Mobile TV is heading for a fall". IDC is somewhere in the middle: On one hand, it issued a press release titled "No Clear Demand for Mobile TV in Western Europe", and on the other hand a Cellular News item titled "Substantial Market Expansion for Mobile TV Services" quotes IDC's forecast for 24M mobile TV and video users in the USA by 2010, up from 7M this year.

Mobile TV Chipset Prices Fall Below $10

According to a new market research report published by ABI Research, the price of Mobile TV chipsets from several vendors has fallen below the $10 price point, enabling the technology to gain serious traction in the high-end and smart phone handset segments by early 2007. ABI Research expect the price to fall below $5 in the next few years, enabling mass market adoption of the technology following its integration in mid-tier handsets. According to the report, the major handset semiconductor vendors such as TI, Freescale and Analog devices have the full handset system knowledge which is required for integrating the mobile TV function, while newcomers such as DibCom, Frontier Silicon and Siano Mobile have the advantage of focusing exclusively mobile TV technologies. Siano Mobile recently announced a joint reference design with Intel for mobile TV enabled 3G handsets, using the Xscale-based "Mohanas" application processor.

Highlights of the IMA Mobile TV Conference

The Israeli Mobile Association (IMA) held a conference yesterday dedicated to the topic of Mobile TV technologies and services. The conference featured an impressive array of speakers from technology companies and mobile operators in Israel and abroad, who provided useful insights into the current mobile TV market. Below are some highlights from the conference.

Martin Richartz, Senior Technology Manager at Vodafone Group R&D, described the "mobile broadcast TV showdown" which will take place in Germany during the FIFA world cup next month. The games will be broadcast using a DVB-H network, operated by a consortium of all 4 German MNOs, and using a T-DMB network, operated by German start-up MFD. Mr Richartz urged the industry to converge on a bearer-agnostic IP service layer, which will ride on top of MBMS, DVB-H and eDAB, and enable service providers and content creators to roll out global services.

Guy Bauman, VP Business Development at Pelephone, gave an operator's view on mobile TV services. He described the Pelephone Zoom TV portal, which mixes video download, on-demand streaming and 21 live TV channels. Pelphone has found that prime time distribution in cellular TV is similar to regular TV, and that most users prefer music (31%), entertainment (29%), sports (11%) and news (10%).

Raimo Malila of Nokia Multimedia discussed the current fragmentation within the DVB-H standard between the DVB-CBMS and the OMA BCAST working group, especially on the issues of Electronic Service Guide (ESG) and content protection (conditional access and DRM).
Mr. Malila also described the possible business models for mobile broadcast TV, which are likely to be lead either by the broadcasters or the mobile operators. At the end of his speech, Mr. Malila presented a business case study for the roll out of a DVB-H network in Israel, claiming that the build-out cost to cover 95% of the population with in-door reception within 3 years would be 12.5M Euros, and the annual operating cost would be about 2-3M Euros per year.

Menno Bangma, Multimedia Services Consultant at TNO, described interative mobile services as a way to "push the portal" to the end-user, since they enable cross selling of content while watching TV, and create attractive opportunities for advertisers, such as impulse response, user feedback and user profile.

The conference concluded with an interesting panel session which gave some insights into the current challenges and roadmap for mobile TV services. The panel mentioned the following main constraints for the roll out of mobile TV services:
* Regulation and frequency aspects
* Standards fragmentation
* Echosystem (business model)
* Cheap terminals and multi-standard terminals (although there is a trade off between the two)

When asked about the best case scenario for mobile TV adoption, most panel participants replied that initial commercial services will be available within 18 months, and mass-market adoption is expected around 2008-2009.

Mobile TV Market Forecast Roundup

This week was characterized by numerous mobile TV market research reports pouring in, each providing their own take on the current and forecasted market size. Unfortunately, the market research firms still don't provide a clear definition of what they include in their mobile TV forecasts: Is it just broadcast mobile TV using DVB-H, T-DMB, ISDB-T or MediaFlo, or do the numbers also include TV steaming over cellular networks, TV episode downloads, etc. Anyway, you can be the judge of the figures below.

First are the highlights of an upcoming Telephia market research report on mobile TV and video, which were published by cellular news this week. According to Telephia's report, 3 million wireless subscribers in the USA (about 1.5% of the total subscribers) viewed TV or video content on their mobile devices in Q4 2005. The report also found that the ARPU for these subscribers is $94, $40 higher than the ARPU of all American subscribers which is $54. While these results seem quite promising, the report also found that the increase in mobile TV and video penetration from Q1 2005 to Q4 2005 was only 0.1%.

eMarketer is also on the positive side this week, announcing their new report titled "Mobile TV for Marketers: Monetizing the Smallest Screen". According to eMarketer, the number of 3G subscribers who watch broadcast TV on their phones will rise from 4.2 million this year to 13.9 million next year, eventually reaching over 100 million subscribers by 2009.

UK Business Intelligence firm Datamonitor took a more conservative view on the mobile broadcast TV market. In a report published this week, Datamonitor claims that the growth of the mobile broadcast TV market will be limited by several issues, including spectrum allocation, expensive handsets, standards fragmentation and the competition with 3G video services. Nevertheless, Datamonitor still predicts that 69 million subscribers to mobile broadcast TV services in 2009.

Mobile TV Device Update

A lot of news coming in on mobile TV handsets in the last few days, mainly due to the CeBIT 2006 exhibition which opens today. EE Times reports that Kitae Lee, president of Samsung Telecommunications, opened CeBIT today with a prediction that the global mobile TV handset market will reach about 6 million units this year, and that Samsung plans to grab 20% of this market.

Samsung is also showing an "Ultra-Mobile PC" (UMPC) device at the show, the type of device that caught the industry's attention in the last few weeks under the code name "Origami". According to a report by Engadget, Samsung's device will have an optional DMB (and eventually DVB-H) expansion module.

LG announced their first commercial T-DMB phone for Europe, which will be released first in Germany during May of this year. The device features a rotating 2.2" LCD screen, and claims a 3 hour battery life while viewing TV broadcasts. Two other mobile TV handsets which will be shown at CeBIT are the Sagem myMobileTV and the BenQ DVB-H phone.

China Mobile TV Forecast from In-Stat

In-Stat issued a press release today with some figures from its market research report on the Chinese mobile TV market. According to In-Stat, there will be 94 million mobile TV subscribers in China by 2009, with DVB-H being the dominant technology. This growth will be the result of the Chinese government push for widespread mobile TV availability for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

There have been numerous mobile TV forecasts in the past few months (see for example my post on a recent Northern Research forecast), but unfortunately the market analysts fail to define, in most cases, what they mean by mobile TV. Mobile TV could be defined as mobile broadcast TV services only (DVB-H, T-DMB, ISDB-T, etc.); it can include TV broadcasts on cellular networks (unicast and/or MBMS), and it can also include video clip download of TV shows, either over cellular networks or originating from a PC synchronization. Therefore, in order to enable comparison of different published forecasts, it is important that information distributed by the analysts will include their definition of the mobile TV market scope.

Mobile TV Predications from Modeo CEO

CommsDesign published an article yesterday quoting a speech by Michael Schueppert, president of Modeo, at the DVB World Forum in Dublin (Modeo is the Crown Castle subsidiary which is deploying a DVB-H network in the USA). Schueppert makes some interesting predictions on the future of mobile TV, such as:
* In 3 years, the global Mobile TV market will be worth $3B
* Only half of the viewers will use cellular phones to access the service
* DVB-H and MediaFlo will succeed, but T-DMB will eventually fail
* Two media formats will coexist in mobile TV: H.264/AAC, and Microsoft WMA/WMV
* Voting in TV shows will be the most powerful interactive feature of mobile TV

3GSM 2006 Mobile TV Update - Part 3

To round up our 3-part summary of mobile TV news at 3GSM, Strategy Analytics published a new market research report on the topic of mobile TV, predicting that revenues from TV phone sales will increase form $8B in 2006 to $30B in 2010. The report also forecasts that DVB-H will account for 19% of TV phones in 2006, rising to 40% of the total TV phone market in 2010.

Not only phones will be able to receive mobile TV broadcasts, but portable game consoles as well. In a press conference in Tokyo yesterday, Nintendo said they will offer a mobile TV receiver card for the Nintendo GameBoy DS. The receiver will be available in Japan only, and will support the mobile ISDB-T broadcasts which are scheduled to begin in April.

And back to the good old TV-over-cellular services: Alcatel announced that T-Mobile has selected its technology to provide interactive mobile TV services over EDGE and 3G in the UK, Germany and Austria. Alcatel will be responsible for aggregating the live TV content, producing the mobile-specific channels, and hosting the service platform for all three countries from its centre in Stuttgart, Germany.

Mobile TV to reach 107 million subscribers by 2010

According to a new market research report published by Northern Sky Research , mobile TV is expected to grow significantly in the next few years, driven by the increased capacity of cellular networks, the decreasing price of video-enabled handsets, and the deployment of mobile broadcast networks. NSR predicts that by 2010, there will be 107 million subscribers to mobile TV worldwide using cellular, MBMS and mobile broadcast networks such as DVB-H, T-DMB and MediaFlo. The cellular networks will continue to dominate in the next few years, until the broadcast networks are fully deployed, and until reasonably priced handsets which support these networks become available.