Okay something doesn’t add up. UK based Continental Research says that only 3% of people in the UK say they want to try mobile TV. Most users says Continental, want a compact phone with a small screen, which restricts the kind of programming suitable for mobiles.
Meanwhile MobiTV, the US aggregator and handset software supplier of a mobile TV player, said coincidentally that it has passed the three million subscriber mark for mobile TV worldwide, adding the last million subscribers in just six months.
Okay we grant you that 3 million is not a great number, when you compare that to the 3 billion devices out there, but it has to be remembered that this is ‘cellular unicast streaming’ not what we would call real mobile TV, in both instances. There is no high resolution broadcast mobile TV in the UK, so the customers there are clearly talking about streaming services and so far that’s all that MobiTV’s service runs on.
Granted MobiTV is working on offering a software client for DVB-H, cellular multicasting and even WiMAX TV services, but so far none of those are launched.
So when Continental cites continued reception problems for mobile TV services, especially when traveling and there being poor word-of-mouth support for mobile TV, we would suggest that they are giving ‘poor word of mouth’ support to the broadcast mobile TV services that are yet to be launched in the UK, putting off customers because previous generation services are not a good experience.
The report concludes that the take-up of mobile TV would be better if advertiser-funded content was offered for no fee at all, and with free download time, something that would leave cellcos with no ARPU and lots of costs ‘ a conclusion not reached by surveys in Finland, Italy, Spain, France, the UK (twice), Korea, Germany, Austria and countless other places around the world, where proper QVGA services at 30 frames a second, on robust broadcast networks, have consumers excited and prepared to pay money.
The MobiTV service has reached 3 million customers on both branded and white labeled services through more than 20 operators internationally, with more than 100 channels, video-on-demand, primetime and made-for-mobile or broadband programming.
GSMA calls for spectrum, regulatory framework for African Cellcos
At an African cellular summit held this week the GSM Association highlighted plans to spend a further $50 billion on African cellular networks in the next five years and called for over 100 MHz above the 750 MHz line to be reserved in the area for cellular services, citing the long propagation distances in this range.
Specifically the GSMA called for the World Radiocommunication Conference to allocate 750MHz to 862MHz spectrum to cellular.
The GSMA said that around $35 billion had been invested in Africa so far by companies like MTN, Orange, Vodacom and Zain subsidiary Celtel, and hopes for 90% coverage of sub-Saharan Africa over the next five years using GSM, GPRS, EDGE and HSPA technologies and asked for Internet access to be part of the aims.
It also called for African governments to ensure spectrum is available, and that direct taxes on cellular usage are removed in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia, and that high license fees and regulatory bottlenecks, such as international gateway monopolies, are removed as obstacles.
The GSMA says there are 150 million mobile subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa and a further 350 million live within mobile coverage but do not yet have mobiles.