Caution urged over mobile TV
Thursday, 23 Mar 2006 00:01
Caution urged over mobile TV
Mobile phone users may have to wait a little longer for much-vaunted broadcast television services than predicted, a new report has claimed.
Research published today analysing the emergence of broadcast television on mobile phones by market analyst Datamonitor provides a "conservative forecast" of the new medium's short term prospects.
In particular it details a series of difficulties that have yet to be resolved, including disputes over which technology should be used and question marks over whether handsets will be able to cope with the substantial requirements of video streams.
"Datamonitor takes as conservative outlook for broadcast TV," confirmed Adrian Drozd, the research firm's senior media and broadcast analyst.
"Growth of mobile TV may be limited by the problems over spectrum allocation, the high price of handsets… and operators wanting to push 3G video services, not broadcast TV to mobile services."
In addition the report suggests that content security is an issue, questioning whether or not users will be prepared to pay around $10 a month for broadcast TV services.
But despite their pessimistic evaluation, the report claims that 69 million people will subscribe to mobile phones with broadcast TV services by 2009.
With the costs for broadcast TV not yet established it remains unclear whether or not the predicted revenues of $5.5 billion will be sufficient to make the service economically viable.
