Mobile TV is dead – long live mobile video
After the years of hype about the great opportunities mobile TV had to offer to the mobile operators it is now safe to rather unceremoniously bury that theory.
BuddeComm has discounted efforts to capture the mobile TV service in concepts or products such as ‘TV’ and ‘portals’ ever since the early 00s, when the mobile operators introduced it as the next big revenue earner.
We have always said that mobile video would have a great future; the next level of communication is video-based, no doubt about that. However, like all the other digital media services, it will need to be based on business concepts that are developed by the digital media industry – the business models developed by the telco industry have failed dismally in every single respect.
This doesn’t relate only to mobile TV. It also applies to the other premium mobile services – Premium SMS, and previous the telco based Internet portals, which died many years ago.
A completely different approach is needed for the digital media business model and the associated financial models. For close to a decade the mobile industry has been talking about mobile TV. True, the first technologies used for it were rather crude, but the so-called 2.5G technologies started to show what would be possible, from a technology point of view at least. However, attempts to then link it to TV and try to attract users by offering TV content over a mobile phone never took off in any serious way.
The second major strategic error was limiting these services to monopolised portals. Penalising potential video content providers by demanding outrageously high percentages of their revenues was another sure way to kill any serious developments in this market.
The mobile industry had a rude awakening when the iPhone began to separate content from carriage. Suddenly all kinds of applications, including video-based ones, became available, independently of the mobile operators. While over the last decade the mobile operators might have been able to develop a hundred or so applications each, after two years iPhone applications have reached the 140,000 mark.
More than 80% of these apps can be freely downloaded, but this year the 20% paid-for applications will already have overtaken the revenues earned in the carriers’ portal markets. What has been built up by the mobile operators over a 20-year period has basically been killed off in two years.
Sure, some of the portals will linger on for a while but their day has well and truly passed.
Even putting aside the strategic business mistakes made by the mobile operators, it is very clear that this approach has killed off innovation for many years to come.
This development is a clear indication that mobile TV ‘Mark I’, as developed by the mobile operators, is dead and buried and that the future of this market will be based on the open network principles of the digital media industry.
Paul Budde
See also:
- Global – Mobile Media – Mobile TV & Video
- Global – Mobile Media – Content & Services Trends
- Global – Mobile Data – M-Commerce & M-Payments
- Global – Wireless Broadband – LTE
