Telegent Systems, the US company that has been setting mobile TV alight by building chips that can pick up analog TV on phones, released research findings today which come about five year too late for the mobile TV industry.
In effect its survey is the same as one carried out in 2004/5 by Nokia, saying that around 58% of a UK research sample of over 2,000 adults, all want mobile TV.
There has never been ANY doubt that consumers want mobile TV, what is in doubt is how mobile operators can make money out of it, and if they can’t, then they don’t yet see a reason to offer it.
The sample identified the same places where consumers would expect to watch mobile TV which were identified during the first efforts to sell DVB-H systems in Europe, which is that they would watch it while commuting, queuing, or in the home or at their work desk. In the younger end of the group, the number that want mobile TV is even higher, with 80% of 18-24 year olds and 76% of 25-34 year olds giving positive reactions.
“The availability of mobile TV in the European market contrasts sharply with ‘developing’ markets such as Africa, Asia and Latin America where it is proving extremely popular,” said Samuel Sheng, president and CEO of Telegent. “To date European operators and consumers have been understandably held back by regulatory and standards confusion, unproven technologies and the costs associated with building and operating mobile specific TV platforms. All of these issues can be avoided by using the existing broadcast TV infrastructure and building the receiver technology into the handset.”
Telegent reckons that it already has shipped 80 million chips into handsets so that people can watch analog mobile TV on their phones. The company was supposed to go public recently on the back of this success, but pulled its IPO weeks after filing it. One rumor has it that RDA in China, a local rival, is gradually eating into the Telegent shipments in China, which is still responsible for at least 80% of the devices with Telegent chips in.
So far Telegent has begun signing deals in Latin America and is known to also be working on a hybrid chip that will offer analog TV as well as digital DVB-T, which must be destined for Europe. It’s likely that the research it is doing in the UK is paving the way for the introduction of devices based on this chip in Europe.
Telegent currently has deals with many smaller handset makers but recently Samsung and ZTE have joined them.
Naturally it wants to make a killing based on the World Soccer Cup and by contrast with FLO TV, the digital system which has been built in the US at a cost of over $1 billion, it doesn’t have to pay large sums of money to source content ‘ existing free to air TV signals can be picked up with its phones. The only downsides ‘ below average video quality and a faster battery burn, only prove difficult if a digital system, which is better on both counts, is already in place. The UK has little or no chance of a digital mobile TV service being introduced in the UK before 2012, because it has no suitable spectrum available for auction until the analog switch off has happened. The research figures were provided by UK researcher YouGov using a sample size of 2463 adults.