The French regulator has chosen the TV channels for its first DVB-H multiplex, and delayed as it might be, almost a year or so late, and it possibly won’t make it out the door inside 2008, the service is varied and thoughtful and will be made up of mostly TV channels that are free to air, with a handful of paid channels.
The CSA, the French audiovisual regulator selected the channels for this multiplex based on their current popularity, and it is likely that cellular operators will get to charge a small premium for providing a DVB-H mobile handset, and keep most of it, as well as getting kickbacks for mobile TV subscribers on the paid channels. The only thing that remains to be seen is how hard the local cellular operators will push the service and what service bundles they will each come up with.
This is a very sensible selection of channels from a country that understands the problems of getting DVB-H off the ground, unlike the content selections on say MediaFLO in the US, which derive from made for mobile content and which were always going to fail.
But only in protectionist France could the part publicly owned France Telecom be allowed to use public money (mostly borrowed) to bid for sports rights (it has part ownership of the soccer rights) to create its own paid for sports channel and then gain the rights to put that on Mobile TV.
All over the world all pay TV services have been shown to be powered by sports first, news and films second, and France Telecom and its Orange brand is already part way to dominating French cellular broadcasting. It offers inferior quality cellular unicast services for 62 TV channels, and will now have a core broadcast channel on the very first DVB-H multicast of 16 TV channels.
This is pretty much in line with how we have been told to expect the French DVB-H market to pan out over the past three years of DVB-H anticipation. Other markets like Finland have gone the same route, while Italy has been a purely commercial set of propositions, with commercial interests deciding everything.
France Telecom’s Orange Sports is not the only new TV channel (launched last September on a DVB-T multiplex), and celebrated film director Luc Besson has added his own EuropaCorp TV. The remaining eleven choices are BFM TV, Canal Plus, Direct 8, Eurosport, I-Tele, M6, NRJ 12, NT1, TF1, Virgin 17 and W9 and three channels are reserved for public broadcasters France 2, France 3 and Arte.
The CSA hopes to offer a second multiplex during 2009 with spectrum harvested from the analog switch-off, which would offer fifteen more mobile TV channels.
The CSA said that the chosen channels represented 48% of broadcast audiences but said that one-third of content on Mobile TV versions of these channels is allowed to be different from the terrestrially delivered channel, which presumably will mean that a similar percentage of advertising will be different and extra, and give the operators a chance to develop regional and addressable advertising models in the future as volumes of handsets are taken up. Rethink has projected French uptake of Mobile TV handsets to reach 12.6 million devices and finally overtake Italy as the leading DVB-H nation, by 2012 (see Faultline report ‘In search of a Mobile TV Business Model.’
Eurosport will charge €1 per month, and Canal Plus, which is a pay TV channel, will charge €25 ($39) to non-subscribers to its regular pay TV service and €15 ($23.5) to subscribers. Canal Plus says it begins making money once it has 500,000 Mobile TV customers taking the channel. The other channels be part of a low priced subscription bouquet bundled into mobile phone service bundles or included in the purchase cost of separate pocket TVs devices.
In a way, Orange had to make a bid to create a compelling channel of its own, because rival cellco SFR is partly owned by Vivendi, owner of Canal Plus, as well as Vodafone.
Back in January, 36 proposals for Mobile TV services were sent to the CSA to choose between and one failed bid was a second channel from Orange called O’TV. The licenses are being issued for a period of 10 years with the possibility to extend them for a further five.