@ MES: How Expensive Is Mobile TV?

(c) MocoNews

One of the interesting speakers on the "Battle for video mindshare" panel at MES was Joachim Blunck, SVP digital content at Bunim-Murray Productions, who was very focused on the cost of producing the content for mobile TV. When Jordi Aliagas, VP at Arena Mobile, said overseas people liked things they couldn't see on TV, "it has to be something specifically created for mobile", Blunck agreed with him but said "that's a problem, because you can't afford to do it...the first cable networks had to be dirt cheap to compete with television". He questioned whether mobile TV can afford to be specially produced.

"There's a paradox in play here that everyone's ignoring," said Blunck. "There is a handful of major handset manufacturers out there that are trying to get you to buy their handsets, that's their job...Carriers are run by very conservative people, very risk adverse, slowly move the market to where they want. So they go with established networks...Getting mobile specific networks won't happen until someone plunks down a lot of dough, which no-one will do because they don't know what consumers want.' Hence, carriers would just dump current TV on mobile phones, because it's the less risky route.

That wasn't the view of Michael Ramke, VP at Modeo, at the Mobile Digital TV Alliance breakfast. He said that Modeo gets unsolicited offers of content all the time, so while Modeo needs to win with the big guys it has plenty of unique content to choose from to be part of its offering. He said there is far more content available than channels that are technically possible with broadcast TV technology, which is a good place for them to be.

The panel was asked about advertising, and Tom Parrish, SVP in business development at SmartVideo, pointed out that TV and video comes from a background of an advertising business model while mobile comes from a revenue business model. "I believe advertising is going to play a huge role in the market going forward...Carriers make their money on subscription revenue share, so there are advertising trials going on and it's a big power battle going on...carriers take 40% revenue and the advertising model turns that upside down."

Adam Guy, MD of Compete, said that consumer tolerance for advertising on mobile phones is pretty high. "In the US only 35% said no way would they want ads on the cellphone. But they're going to need something for it." This came out at the consumer panel which was held later – even the lady who insisted there was no way she'd accept any kind of advertising on her phone said it would be ok to get some video ads if they were entertaining.

Scott Wills, President and COO of Hiwire, said that overseas studies showed that different people were willing to pay different amounts for mobile TV. "If you can drop the subscription fees to $3 a month and its ad supported you have a huge business," he said.

Technorati tags: mobile TV