Variety magazine said this week that 3 Italia has confessed that it had only reached 300,000 mobile TV subscribers by the end of January, a figure that 3 Italia would not confirm to us, and which is frightfully close to the numbers that it announced at the end of October.
If the figure is true, it looks like the DVB-H TV service has bit a roadblock, which was probably the launch of two major rivals in its own backyard. By the end of October 3 Italia, the first DVB-H mobile TV service to go live in the world in Summer 2006, said it had reached 250,000 subscribers and would reach 500,000 by the end of the year.
Both Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) and Vodafone, which boast dominant market shares in Italy, have since launched equivalent DVB-H services since 3 Italia last gave a progress report and it could have been that 3 Italia was using the mobile TV service to drive churn and that once its rivals got their services together that churn stopped. TIM has 26 million customers, Vodafone Italy 20 million and 3 Italia only 6.8 million when they all last reported.
But that still doesn’t give us a handle on how fast the other two services are growing, and even if they have stopped a big churn in favor of 3 Italia, it doesn’t mean that they have a high number of mobile TV customers.
All of the mobile TV world is focused intensely on Italy to see what rate at which three rival subscribers can shift Italians over to mobile TV, and whether or not intense rivalry will erode service pricing dramatically. TIM began its mobile TV service in September and Vodafone in December last year, so it’s very early days to see how the battle plays out.
Variety says that the next move in the battle is to begin adding more and more players and handsets to the mix which play DVB-H TV, including one with a 4.3-inch screen. DVB-H is one of the mobile TV technologies that that allows for the setting up of a separate network, so that non-handsets can also be introduced to the equation, and these could come to market as cheaply as $100.
3 Italia’s latest introduction was an adult TV channel, which is thought to have re-energized its sales, but apart from that its most popular programming is sport and news.
This week 3 Italia also said it planned to help Malaysian Maxis Communication launch DVB-H services providing know how in billing, network build and handset integration for a launch that is meant to go ahead in 2007.