Mobile TV 'five years away'
October 14, 2008
A new report from StrategyEye, ‘Mobile TV – Separating Hype from Reality’, concludes that receiving television on our mobile phones will not be an everyday reality for at least another five years. "Despite the hype, mobile TV will remain a digital media pipedream for at least five years," concludes Thomas Warren, StrategyEye Digital Media Analyst and report author. "Currently, no credible financial rewards combined with a lack of broadcast and handset technology standardisation have hamstrung the sector."
The StrategyEye report examines why, despite its potential, the sector is impeded by numerous hurdles. Since its inception in Korea in 2005, watching broadcast TV, interactive TV and video on our mobile phones has been an alluring concept and the mobile TV sector has seen some steady growth in Asia and moderate or lesser growth in Europe and the US. Widespread and large-scale investment has taken place across all three continents, but the sector is yet to yield profits and users experience a high level of technical frustration.
"There are about six different standards of broadcasting around the world and, without standardisation, mobile TV is hard to roll out,” says Thomas Warren. “If you add to this the fact that few handsets are able to receive broadcast TV, then you start to see the scale of the problems facing the Digital Media sector."
StrategyEye maintains that it will take government legislation to force broadcasters and handset suppliers to comply with standardisation.
"The EU created non-binding legislation but this has not worked," says StrategyEye CEO Nick Gregg. "Maybe when they do make it binding, as is planned, we will start to see real progress."