Mobile TV Broadcasting: Industry Research Report

Mobile TV Broadcasting

Published Date: October 2007

Published By: Berg Insight

Order Code: R601-34

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Although many homes are already steeped in high-tech, there are pockets of archaic technology in our daily lives that have not changed much since our parents’ days. One such activity is TV watching. Although the hardware has evolved greatly with ever larger screens and cinema-like sound quality, and the choice of channels has multiplied several hundred times, the actual activity of TV-watching itself is enjoyed in pretty much the same way as it was in its very early days: with a group of persons seated in comfortable furniture with choice high-calorie snacks at hand, passively consuming mass-produced and -distributed video contents.

This way of experiencing media is far from the expectations of young consumers who demand interactive, creative and personal experiences, making TV in its traditional form an outmoded phenomenon with a slowly but irrevocably aging user base.

The expression “mobile TV” often refers to any audiovisual content watched on a portable device, but handy TVs have been available for decades and never been any great success. What makes it different this time is that one of the devices in which the TV tuner can be embedded is the mobile phone, which unlike all other portable devices distinguishes the viewer and offers a return path via which the viewer can participate and interact. These are the means for the TV networks to leave the passive consumer - couch-potato - era behind and ascend to the new generation of dynamic media; TV 2.0 if you will. Television is no longer a set stream of programs pushed out through an open-ended channel where unknown people might or might not be watching, but the targeted transmission of hand-picked content at a time and place selected by an identified viewer.

The new generation of mobile TV has the power to combine the features of regular TV as we know it with new interactive and personalised services. It can extend the reach of traditional TV to situations where today we do not have access to it, but also add a whole new dimension to the concept, evolving it way beyond the realms of current broadcasting. The ubiquitous nature of the mobile device, always being at hand wherever we find ourselves, invites the viewer to seek time and place sensitive and pushes content producers to exploit the possibilities of a TV terminal that is not stationary and waiting for users to come to watch it, but accompanies the viewers in their world and everyday life. Examples of context aware programming could be for example local news or weather forecasts, travel and tourist information, music or movies that are locally associated and context based courses and education.

Another new venue to explore is opened up by the mobile’s role as personal production tool. Ever since the first cameras were embedded in mobile phones, the tiny devices have become the personal life recorder and multimedia diaries of a whole generation. In addition, the fact that these devices are in every pocket turns anybody on the scene into a make-shift TV-team, and amateur videos and images captured by cellular phones are now regularly featured even in professional mass media. The circle was completed when commercial programs and services completely based on amateur content appeared.

There is every reason to believe that this development will continue and progress on mobile TV with the mobile phone not just being the tool for creating content, but also to edit, broadcast, see, share, manipulate and influence it. The movement towards citizen journalism and amateur productions will be even more pronounced, moving beyond entertainment with new applications such as made-for-mobile travellers’ shows as well as home improvement, gardening and cooking programs based on contributions by viewers.

All this will however depend on the ability of broadcasters, content producers, advertisers, mobile operators and handset makers to meet the technical challenges as well as those of managing the cultural shift and merging of these different media worlds onto a new platform. Many mobile operators will find it difficult to justify investments in a service which they have no obvious financial incentive to support and which even stands to erode their revenue from other data services. Berg Insight does however believe that mobile operators need to see their involvement in mobile TV more as a strategic requirement than a business option.

Berg Insight warns both operators and broadcasters against seeing mobile TV as merely television as we know it on a mobile terminal, but embraces the basic conjecture that mobile TV is an entirely new service on a completely different media. There are a number of fundamental differences in expectations and behaviours between the regular TV viewer and the mobile user, and services based on simply regurgitated TV-content will merely be TV on a small and inconvenient screen. It is imperative that the industry works already from start to evolve TV services as one part of a comprehensive content strategy and portfolio of inter-woven entertainment services rather than a simple re-broadcasting service.

There were an estimated 820 million PCs in the world at the end of 2006; the number of TV sets numbered 1.5 billion. At the same time an estimated 2.7 billion people around the world had mobile phones, and around 80 percent of the world's population enjoys mobile phone coverage. The mobile TV’s appeal of combining the lure, comfort and familiarity of television with the exciting, creative, immediate and intimate world of mobile, is a recipe for services that could permeate the largest device and communications market in the world.

This report discusses the different issues and challenges involved and gives recommendations for different actors on how to explore and develop these possibilities.

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