Will mobile TV grow in popularity?

Mobile TV is a subject that not many people know much about. So why is this? You would have thought that the chance to watch TV on your mobile would deem itself popular to people, but it seems people are only slowly gaining momentum for this idea. Despite this, analysts are currently predicting that 2009 will see user numbers increase to 54 million, and that by 2013, there will be around 300 million people watching mobile TV, on what has been nicknamed, the 'third screen'.

"Mobile TV is just not as big a deal as we all thought it would be," Frank Dickson of Reed Business told the BBC. "The idea combines the two biggest things around: TV and phones. Everyone has a TV and everyone has a mobile phone. So of course the industry thought the prospect of bringing the two together was going to be huge. In reality, live mobile TV has been very slow to take off," explained Dickson.

The study was conducted by In-Stat, which is part of Reed Business, and Californian chip maker Telegent Systems. It revealed that mobile TV users watch at least three times a week, with 20 percent of those watching daily. Two-thirds of respondents in the white paper said they watched mobile TV for 30 minutes or more on the days they tuned in. In comparison, in the leading markets of Japan and Korea, viewers are glued to their third screen for over an hour.

Flo TV, which is owned by the wireless company Qualcomm, agreed that the amount of time people spend on mobile TV has surpassed the early belief that users would consume content in five-minute "snacks."

"No one expects mobile TV to be watched eight hours a day like a typical household watches at home but this 30 minutes is a very meaningful figure," Jonathan Barzilay, Flo TV's senior vice president of programming and advertising told the BBC. "We have seen tremendous spikes in viewing for live news and sport. The Michael Jackson memorial service was the highest watched programming for Flo TV, for instance. Prior to that the presidential election was record-setting for us. We continually see huge spikes for sport; for football, basketball, baseball and the like. People clearly want to stay connected even if their lifestyle requires them to be at work, or travelling or on the sidelines of a kids soccer game."

In its most recent Three Screen Report, Nielsen found that the estimated 13.4 million Americans who watch video on mobile phones average 3.5 hours of content compared to the three hour average for internet video. Nielsen believes that mobile viewership is flat from a year ago when about 13 million people watched videos on their cell phones. It is reported that this is partly down to the fact only about 18 percent of the 270 million cell phone users in the US have smart phones like the iPhone, BlackBerry or Nokia N97

As well as this, Industry watchers believe analogue TV will win over digital TV on the smartphone, especially in developing countries.

"Analogue mobile TV accounts for the majority of the world," said Dickson. While we tend to focus on digital in the more industrialised nations where they are turning off the analogue signal, in the lesser developed economies they don't have plans to switch to digital. As a result we see a strong uptake of mobile TV in Latin America, Central Europe, Africa and China."

Telegent Systems have said that the research showed that more than 85 percent of the world's population will continue to have access to analogue signals for the next several years or longer.

"The success of the free-to-air mobile TV is the result of two primary drivers," said Telegent CEO Weijie Yun. "The fact that the content that consumers view is the same broadcast as what they watch on conventional TV. And two, the universal coverage enabling consumers to watch it in almost every corner around the world."

Dickson has said that he believed for mobile TV to really take off, it has to offer free-to-air content. "When we can get TV on our handset which is funded by advertising instead of subscriptions, we see a strong uptake. At the end of the day, nothing is more compelling than free."

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