US researcher Multimedia Intelligence reckons that Mobile TV and Mobile Video will amount to a $15 billion industry by 2012, including both direct subscriptions as well as advertising.
While we see this as a very low number, we accept that there are innumerable hurdles in the way of broadcast mobile TV, and while we feel this will eventually take off, in many instances it will not have a high subscription revenue attached to it, if any at all. Many services that already exist such as the ISDB-T mobile 1 seg services in Japan and T-DMB in Korea, rely almost entirely on advertising.
The company distinguishes Mobile video as that video which relies on the mobile operator’s 3G network for delivery, and here Multimedia Intelligence say this has the advantage of an established network, making it the stronger of the two categories in today’s market. But it warns that mobile TV infrastructure deployments and mobile TV handsets are rolling out aggressively, making mobile TV the dominant category by 2012.
The researcher also notes the ability of Mobile TV to enable new forms of advertising, including what it calls ‘call to action’ advertising, which we presume to mean interactive advertising that you can respond to right now, which it says will exceed $1 billion by 2012.
Not surprisingly the researcher found that Mobile TV ARPUs are much higher in North America and Europe than Asia due to the lack of free-to-air alternatives in those countries, which was pretty obvious to someone that’s covered this area.