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Mobile TV The next European mega trend?
Thirty years ago, most of us had not considered it possible that everybody can talk to everybody from everywhere. Meanwhile this dream has become true for nearly a quarter of the world population who own mobile phones. Today, most of us cannot imagine that we could watch TV wherever we are. Tomorrow, this will be just as normal as making a mobile phone call. The time has never been as good as now for a boom in mobile TV. Technologies and mobile terminals are maturing fast, and, most importantly, there is a world-wide event coming up creating tremendous demand for watching content on the move: the football world cup 2006 in Germany. Also the European Commission is enthusiastic about the new emerging mobile TV service. The EU information society and media Commissioner Viviane Reding said at CeBIT, Hanover, in March 2006: “Mobile TV is an opportunity for Europe. I see this issue as a matter of urgency”. As always there are a few threats. The rivalry between several technologies in the mobile TV area and restrictions concerning available spectrum could limit the success of this new service. Market forecasts look mostly good The analysis of one of the first commercial mobile TV pilots early 2005 in Helsinki shows that 41% of the pilot participants would be willing to purchase mobile TV services; a fee of 10 euro was considered reasonable. At the mobile Entertainment Summit in September 2005 in San Francisco, analysts from the Yankee Group and Frost & Sullivan estimated that the mobile TV market in the US is worth between 16 and 28 million dollar in 2004 growing to 750 to 1020 million dollar by 2008. A recent forecast by Credit Swiss First Boston estimated the world market for mobile TV handsets to hit 40 million units in 2007, and 150 million units in 2009. There are also less optimistic market forecasts, which suggest that people don’t want to pay extra fees for mobile TV services. In this case the required income for the service providers could, for instance, come from advertisements or from selling value-added services. Unicast versus broadcast There are different ways of bringing a TV picture to a mobile device. The most natural approach for telcos would be streaming: a UMTS or HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) connection could be used to stream a specific TV channel to an individual terminal. This has already been offered as commercial service by various service providers, such as Orange and Vodaphone. It is ideal for on-demand personalised video services. However, it is costly and not feasible for very large numbers of users. It will probably develop into a kind of niche market for personalised and on-demand video streaming. The article from FP6 project Daidalos within this cover theme sheds some light on the QoS aspects of this type of service. Alternatively a terrestrial or satellite broadcast technology could be used. Because mobile terminals are small and have limited battery and computing power, normal broadcast services like DVB-S or DVB-T are not very suitable for this purpose. Broadcast technologies tailored to mobile use are for example DVB-H, DMB and MediaFLO. Since it is a broadcast service, all viewers get access to the same channels. The great advantage is that unlimited numbers of users can access the service. Think about the several thousand spectators at a football match in a stadium, who want to watch again the last goal in slow motion. Such a request would easily overload and crash a UMTS service, whilst there is no problem if a broadcast service is used. Winners and losers Analysts expect that the revenues will be redistributed amongst the different players. Unless personalised mobile TV to individual terminals will become the mass market, the lion’s share is expected to go to the content providers, the broadcasters and the mobile terminal manufacturers. There is probably very little money for the mobile operators. “You don’t need mobile operators’ networks to broadcast”, said Eleanan Liew, Gartner’s telecoms analyst in Singapore. Competing technologies One of the biggest technological challenges for mobile TV broadcasting is probably spectrum availability, and one of the largest business threats is most likely the existence of at least three major competing technologies.
For more details on the different technologies please see the Tutorial by Heinz Brüggemann. The important business question is whether the existence of those rival technologies will cause customer acceptance problems. It definitely will to some extent, how much depends on the marketing strategies. If, for example, the terminals are heavily subsidized by mobile service providers, the customers will probably not care so much. If, however the terminals need to be paid by the users to a large extent, which could well be the case because of missing business cases for the service providers, the customers will very much care whether the technologies are future-proof or not. Outlook Mobile TV is a promising new service, which could provide tremendous revenues particularly to content providers, broadcasters and mobile terminal manufacturers. Mobile operators have to be careful not to be amongst the losers when mobile TV takes off. The time is right, and the football world cup 2006 as well as the Beijing Olympics in 2008 will give an additional boost. However the existence of several competing technologies could have negative impacts on the market take-up of the service. Good answers to the potential customers of the service need to be provided very soon. You can find more information on the following pages: On the take-up of mobile
TV:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3880069.stm Please send us your comments on this article. |
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