What’s Holding Back Mobile TV?
Edn writes…In a week full of mobile TV announcements Electronic News has done a Q&A with industry leaders as to why mobile TV hasn’t taken off in the US. The interviewees are Ed Sawma, senior director of applications marketing at Motorola; Penny Cornali, technical marketing director at PacketVideo; Scott Wills, president and COO of HiWire, and Rutton Ruttonsha, senior VP at NXP. What follows are excerpts of that conversation, and there’s some pretty good quotes.
– In answer to the headline question, Wills said that one of the big issues is that no wireless carrier in the US is convinced mobile TV would be a big business. When I say convinced, I mean that they’re going to take several billion dollars to go build out an infrastructure in the U.S. That leaves it to us and MediaFlow and Modio to go build that out and experiment. If it becomes the success we all expect, then they’ll try to figure out a way to control it. That’s what’s slowing it down–the lack of commitment on the part of wireless carriers. Without that commitment, the networks aren’t being built out and the handsets aren’t being made,??? he said. I was a little surprised he talked about MediaFLO and Modeo but not HiWire… Meanwhile, Sawma pointed out that in many parts of the world it is the broadcasters that are driving mobile TV rather than the telcos, which Samsung has got to draw heart from in its mobile TV push in the US.
–In terms of what consumers are looking for, Wills claimed that about 30 percent of the population wants content tailored for the mobile device, while the rest want traditional content. Sawma sees this as a short term situation: If you ask people what they want first, they want regular TV. Maybe in a few years they’re going to get bored with it, though. What’s going to end up happening is mobile TV will become the center of the interactive environment. We’re creating a sense of community among the mobile users. They’re not only consuming static video. They’re doing a YouTube model or interacting with each other.???
– Ruttonsha claimed there are a lot of misconceptions around mobile TV, saying that in focus groups 10 people would say they wouldn’t watch TV on a mobile screen, but if they were showed a handset running high-resolution content 7 out of 10 said they would get one. I’d agree with this—at CTIA last year I saw one of the latest handsets from across the room, and the picture was very clear.
