DVB-H to be launched in Switzerland and Austria

Thomas Husson | April 24, 2008, 05:11 AM

As expected with the forthcoming UEFA Football cup, Austrian and Swiss players will soon launch DVB-H mobile TV offerings. See here and here.

As in 06 with the German World cup, the idea is to leverage a sport event as a marketing catalyst to educate customers on new services. It worked pretty well for 3 Italy who managed to acquire 250,000 subcribers in the 1st 5 months (most of them during the 5 first weeks of the Worldcup...won by Italy) out of an initial objective of 500,000. At the end of October 07, 3 had reached 750,000 activations. Not all of them pay a fee on a monthly basis though. That being said, 3 Italy is always presented as the successful case study for DVB-H in Europe. It is true usage patterns are quite high for the circa 10% of the installed base who has used the service.

Many other European countries have postponed their DVB-H launches, so it is good news that Swisscom is now officially launching on May 13. As for Vodafone and TIM in Italy, the offer will launch with a very limited range of products: only the Nokia N77! However, the device is heavily subsidized (CHF 1 if 2 years lock-in period on a 25 CHF monthly contract). Samsung SGH-P60 and then N96 (Nokia's new flagship device is supposed to ship in q3 2008 at 550 euros befores taxes and subsidies) will follow. However the DVB-H coverage is pretty ok (44% of the Swiss population according to Swisscom). For the moment, the other Swiss operators are not joining board and are not ready to pay Swisscom Broadcast who owns the Swiss DVB-H license...

Beyond Italy, there are plenty of references to the success of mobile TV in South Korea. When you digg into it, this is far from being crystal clear. None of the 2 business models there have proved to be successful yet:

- S-DMB (paying satellite solution from TU Media) has reached more than 1.25M cutomers mid 07 but losses are huge around 200M euros

- T-DMB (free terrestrial solution) has reached more than 7.5M customers (with only a big third of them on mobile phones) but advertising revenues on which the offer is based, had generated less than 2M $ in S1 2007.

There are many many other issues to be ironed out for mobile broadcasting TV to really take off. First of all, it should not really be opposed to unicast / VOD solutions as is often the case. Jupiter will soon publish a new survey on this topic so please get in touch if you want to participate or watch the space.