Mobile TV news

Thomas Husson | December 18, 2007, 07:41 AM

There have been quite a lot of mobile TV news over the past few weeks. So, here's a wrap up:

- 3 Italia is taking part to the 1st DVB-SH trial in Europe. See press release from Alcatel here. Given S-band is available (not the case of the golden band - UHF), some players are having a look at the satellite solution. More about the technology soup here. 3 Italy has 10% of its installed base (770,000 activations out of 7.7M subs) using DVB-H* at the end of October 2007. However, one should bear in mind take-up was roughly 22k subs / week during the Football World Cup (when the service was launched) and only 8k since then. Also, those are activations (not monthly users) being splitted from a daily access at 4 euros (the majority of activations) to a 3-month package (at 29 euros).

- DVB-H is gaining group worlwdide with commercial launches in Italy, Finland, Malaysia, Philippines, India and Vietnam. The European Commission recently decided it will be the European standard, even though not a mandatory one (see this article in the FT 2 weeks ago). However, the ITU just selected 4 worldwide standards: DVB-H, T-DMB, FLO and One-Seg (ISDB-T, currently used in Japan). Technology fragmentation is being reduced but is still there from a global perpsective...

- South Korea continues to be viewed as a testbed for mobile TV. Reality is 2 different business models are competing: S-DMB (satellite) / paying and T-DMB (terrestrial) / free. S-DMB only managed to reach 1.25 paying subs while T-DMB has roughly 7M subs (out of which slightly more than a third watch on their mobile phones) but only generated 1M+ euros in ad revenues. In both case, business model issues still are at stake: roughly 200M euros accumulated losses for TU Media and no critical mass of advertisers for T-DMB. See the full article in the Korea Times.

- Following a couple of recent trips to Austria and Switzerland, I can confirm there are still great hopes that live sport will be an audience catalyst with the European Football Championship in 2008. Beijings 2008 is also on the target. Once again, I truly believe live sports are social events you do not want to watch on a tiny screen but with friends at homes or in pubs if you don't have a ticket to attend. However, it remains a good way to market the service and attract customers. Not sure however, those services will be launched in due time.

- 3G is and will remain the market reality for a while. Orange France officially announced 637,000* active mobile TV users at the end of September 2007 with an average 32 minutes per month (that's just 1 / day!). However, there are some interesting players, such as ROK TV, having developped an interesting compression technology enabling a 2.5G user-experience for the masses. More info here

Jupiter will publish a new report on this topic early next year. If you want to get in touch, please drop me a line.

UPDATED

* Did you know Nokia does not provide handsets to 3 Italy? LG and Samsung do.

** I read lots of press about the fact that the French market was leading the mobile TV market in Europe with 1.2M subs because Orange was at 1M and SFR at 200k subs. Well, a year ago OF was only at 500k+ so it is strange to me 363,000 subs have been added in only 10 weeks. SFR announced 170,000 subs several months ago...and Bouygues is even not mentionned even though not accounting for a significant part. This is precisely my point: even if it was the case (I don't think numbers here refer to monthly active users), that would be a mere 2.2% of the French mobile population. That's what I refer to as niche.