It was always assumed that getting a phone to pick up existing analog TV signals would kill a phone battery dead in about 20 minutes and produce a rubbish picture and in fact early in Korea virtually provide these points.
But Californian chip maker Telegent Systems has always thought it could apply a little ingenuity to the problem and get a better return out of it, and has made its raison d”tre the delivery of chips which manage decent analog reception with relatively low power. Now it has come out with a white paper, with the help of US researcher In-Stat, which says that there will be 54 million analog mobile TV users by the end of this year, and 300 million by 2013 and begins to talk about usage patterns in just the way its rivals in digital broadcasting have, with primary research conducted in Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Turkey. Although we are not excited about the prospect, we think they are probably calling the numbers about right.
‘The adoption of analog mobile TV handsets has been driven by the most powerful force in the mobile industry: consumers,’ said Frank Dickson, vice president of research at In-Stat. ‘Analog mobile TV has two very fundamental and compelling advantages ‘ cost and availability. The infrastructure is already in place, there are no new standards that need to be enacted and the service is free to consumers ‘ a very powerful combination.’
The paper reveals that mobile TV users in those countries watch mobile TV at least three times a week, with 20% of respondents in all regions watching daily. In some geographies, 40% or more watched daily.
Two-thirds of respondents said they watched mobile TV for thirty minutes or more on the days they watched TV, dispelling the notion that it will ultimately be a vehicle for ‘TV snacking’ when away from home.
For comparison, in Japan and Korea, the leading markets for digital broadcast mobile TV, viewers on average watch over an hour of mobile TV each day.
Most analog viewers watched a mix of program types and watch while travelling, at home and during breaks at work. In Indonesia, where traffic is notoriously bad, the ‘in-transit’ use case predominated but this was in cars, not on commuter trains.
Telegent points out that 85% of the world’s population will continue to have access to analog signals for the next several years or longer and expects free-to-air analog mobile TV to do well in countries which have not yet formulated plans for digital TV, or if they have, in countries where analog will remain for more than five years, especially in markets where the average cellular subscriber doesn’t have the resources to pay for subscription-based mobile TV or for internet access so they can watch YouTube online.
Analog Mobile TV systems still burn batteries faster than digital broadcast systems like ATSC M/H, and still don’t give quite as good a picture, so even Telegent has accepted in the past that in markets where digital broadcast flourishes, analog will not take off. But that’s mighty few right now.