Digitalwall: Mobile TV Market (1) Cell Phone plus TV, the Dream of Everybody

Press a button and the programs are popping up on your screen, with high fidelity and no worry for the cost of data transmission.

[+] Press the button and no program comes on your screen

Watching movies on handsets has been the dream of every telecom operator since the beginning of 3G (of course, they keep telling the consumers through TV ads: "this is what you have been dreaming for"). Fixed line operators, in the meantime, have been doing everything they can to sell IPTV to their customers.

Unfortunately, there have been only a few successes worldwide for those two dreams, which should largely be accredited to their particular geographic or social environments, for example, mobile Internet in Japan, mobile TV in Korea and IPTV in Hong Kong. In other countries or regions? Hardly heard of.

Nevertheless, technological progresses are being made continuously. The development of mobile TV is bringing in a new light of hope into the industry. In fact, "mobile TV" is just a general term, which covers any technology that enables consumers to watch TV on their cell phones.

By that definition, mobile TV has been a reality in CDMA/WCDMA-based 3G cell phones. However, before we go further into the development of the mobile TV sector, we need to take a look at what actually happened to 3G cell phones.

First of all, 3G has 3 major goals: high-speed Internet access, streaming media and video phone. With IP-based Internet access, users cannot get the streaming media movie they want by just pressing a button. Instead, they have to select a set of hierarchical menus.

Throughout the interaction process, users have to send requests and receive responses through the cell phone. A program has to be buffered before being played. This is a sheer difference from our experience with TV, where we get programs by just turning on the TV set. It is this difference that shapes everything.

[+] Billing modes stop consumers

In short, with conventional TV, you get the program as soon as you turn it on, not to mention the fast and effective channel switching through the remote controller. With Internet-based IPTV, you turn it on, but have to wait for a while; you switch a channel, but have to wait for a while; you press the play button, but also have to wait for half a minute. For that reason, IPTV has not been able to replace cable TV, nor has 3G cell phone-based streaming media.

Telecom operators had hoped to graft video phone to movie/TV programs to get better interactive experience (for example, allowing users to watch football games by dialing 123456). However, with the 64K bandwidth and poor transmission quality of video phone (maybe you cannot even see where the ball is), they had to give up.

In addition, there's a billing problem. For decades, telecom operators have been accustomed to billing by minutes or by transmitted data volume, as they say, such billing mode could better reflect their costs (they need to be paid so long as there're data flowing through their telecom equipments). However, consumers are loath to pay. Have you seen anyone who pays his TV bills by minutes?

Monthly billing could be a compromise. However, telecom operators have not been able to introduce total monthly billing packages. For example, they might pack a few programs into one package. However, there are usually many such packages (as each telecom operator would cooperate with a number of content providers). Want to get all the packages? Well, pay for them all!

What's more, the monthly packages only cover the transmission costs of telecom operators. To ensure the reasonable income for content providers, consumers have to pay for contents separately. How could a consumer possibly understand, or withstand so many layers of charges?

Are telecom operators ready to become media companies? It seems not. For example, how about offering completely free mobile TV programs and leaving telecom operators and content providers to earn their bread solely from ads? For telecom operators, that is horrible.

[+] The turmoil of standards

In addition to telecom operators, closely related with the sector are traditional cell phone manufacturers. The global cell phone market has been saturated for years, and the years of fast growth gone. Yet leading cell phone manufacturers are still there and thriving - thanks to continued innovations.

The first innovation might be the camera phone introduced a few years ago, followed by the music phone. New technologies, combined with successful marketing, have triggered tides of changing handsets among consumers. What would be the next innovative application? Obviously, it would be cell phone + TV. And the next? Cell phone + GPS.

Over the years, telecom operators and cell phone manufacturers have learned that consumers favor individual cell phone applications over mobile Internet access. Such applications should be easy and simple, and have nothing to do with Internet accessing.

Now, there are new technologies coming to us. Digital files are transmitted mainly through broadcasting technologies. You will no longer have to wait like you did with 3G or IPTV. Press a button and the programs are popping up on your screen, with high fidelity and no worry for the cost of data transmission.

For the industry, however, the war is just beginning. There are too many standards for using the cell phone as the carrier to play TV programs. While some standards, e.g., DVB-H are derived from the TV industry, others, e.g., MBMS, have their origins in the telecom industry.

TV-derived standards alone have already seen Japanese, Korean, European and Chinese standards, not to mention 3G-based digital TV broadcasting technologies developed by the telecom industry. The turmoil seems to have cast a shadow over the outlook of the sector. (
2007/11/18 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )