Unicast video will have its place, we are sure. However, the early services, whether they were the Live! service from Vodafone, the huge number of TV channels offered by Orange in Europe, the VCast services of Verizon or AT&T Video and Sprint PCS services offered in the US, were all extremely limited.
In surveys of US customers that had experienced these services, around 13% to 15% of them thought that mobile TV had a future.
It was in August 2005 when Nokia first asked people who had experienced a DVB-H mobile TV trials what they thought of it. It turned out that those people were amazed. They had found a cure for boredom. And effectively that’s the biggest driver for mobile TV, and its usage pattern, which shows in the four or five trials that have surveyed their customers. This is particularly noteworthy in public trials in Finland, the UK, and France and the live volume services in Italy, Korea and Japan, with new prime times occurring in journey time to work, in work breaks and in early evening post work, and also later in the home.
About 13% of people asked in surveys what they thought of streaming TV on a mobile would say “it might take off,” while in broadcast services which offer up to 4 times the resolution, around 60% say “We’d buy it,” or “It will take off.
People ask what are the drivers for Mobile TV, and what’s obvious is that quality video on the move was always the driver because it will break into the chunks of boredom that pepper our work days, but only if the quality is sufficiently good that consumers can watch it without getting a headache or eyestrain.
When Nokia first announced the results of its Finland survey it showed that 41% of trial participants were happy to pay for mobile TV services, at $12 a month and that 58% said that they believed broadcast mobile TV services would be popular. And they watched their usual programs, not “mobisodes.” These were national channels including drama, sports and news programming. Given that the national sport of Finland is Ice Hockey, these people found the service had the resolution not only to watch the scores in the corner of the screen, but they could see the tiny puck flying around the ice at incredible speeds. The trial was on while the Ice Hockey World cup was in progress and that was one of the major viewing experiences, along with Formula One car racing and the UEFA Cup Champions League soccer. They went from a standing start to watching 20 minutes a day across the pilot viewers, and some watched an enormous amount of mobile TV, in multiple 30 or 40 minutes chunks each day. Furthermore, when viewers begin to see DVR applications on their handset throughout 2008 and beyond, the problems with TV schedules should diminish. At present the widespread use of simulcast – showing the same channels that are currently on TV - means that the 8.00 am slot is no longer just for housewives and schoolchildren, but is just as likely to be watched by businessmen on the way to work. With the DVR, the businessman will just set his phone DVR to record when he sets his alarm clock, and watch prime time TV in the morning.
Of course, there have been problems with early experiments. The Koreans, with two working systems, have only managed to get 3 million customers on their mobile TV system in a country of 48 million people. However, considering that the two competing services are locked in a political rivalry that sees one without good distribution channels and the other without good content, one realizes that mobile TV services here are a success in spite of themselves.
In Italy around 300,000 customers have bought mobile TV in 6 months out of a population of the 6.8 million existing customers of the operator 3 Italia. This means a penetration of almost 5% in 6 months. Boredom is the driver for mobile TV, but poor execution at the network, establishment of market channels and content availability are all that’s holding it back.
