![]() “Old-fashioned broadcasters who are wedded to the old broadcast model have the biggest challenge because those days are over consumers expect their favorite content when they want it, on whatever platform is most convenient - TV, PC or a mobile phone,” he said. “Consumers are hungry to snack on their favorite content, be that the latest championship soccer goals or ‘Desperate Housewives’,” said Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight. The moving pictures coming slowly onto cellphones are testing demand for different experiences: Samsung and Sony Ericsson have launched movies, the offerings for Apple’s iPhone include TV shows and Nokia has worked with “Heroes” creator Tim Kring to develop new content for launch in Europe’s summer. Others have included the lack of a clear business model, fights for broadcasting rights, numerous different technologies competing for the leading position and a lack of affordable phone models. “A lot of the discussion around mobile TV centered 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 take-up 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. “Mobile TV is all about real-time, linear transmission … where the timing of the programing was set by the broadcaster and the consumer would dip in and dip out,” he said. 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.
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