@MES: Viewing Patterns On Mobile TV

(c) MocoNews by James Pearce

"It may be overhyped, but so what? If we don't overhype how are we going to drive adoption? People aren't out there clamouring for mobile tv...mobile tv is going to have to be marketed." -- Adam Guy, Compete, Managing Director

The broadcast technologies are coming into the last few months before they launch, kind of where the content MVNOs were a year ago (and I think we can expect much the same response...a year of hype, anti-hype and speculation followed by the claim they've failed a mere month or two after they launch). MES had a "Battle for Video Mindshare" panel.

Anyway, according to Adam Guy, MD of Compete, the interest in mobile broadcast TV has doubled in the past year, judging by the number of people who search for information on the topic on the internet... but it's still only about 1%.

Tom Parrish, SVP at SmartVideo, said the viral sharing of content is important, physically handing around phones in a bar, for example. I'm pretty sure he was talking about promoting the service...Scott Wills, president and COO of Hiwire, said it was important to get past the novelty phase. "The answer is in not showing the clip to somebody. We believe that broadcast TV as opposed to video style clips is going to be one of the things driving adoption...Studies have shown people prefer broadcast TV over clips."

I went to the Mobile Digital TV Alliance's breakfast this morning, and there were similar comments. Michael Ramke, VP at Modeo, said the trend started with people showing the phone to friends, then with watching a few minutes at a time, then went on to appointment viewing, where people know they're going to have half an hour at lunch and use it to watch the phone.

Back to the panel, Wills quoted a lot of statistics from overseas data. About two thirds of people want streaming TV as opposed to around a third who want customized content, and when asked how long they want the show to be only 1.5% say less than five minutes, 32% want content 11-30 minutes long. Around half watch at their home or their office. In regards to a question on recording content, he said that of the 62% of people in Korea who want broadcast mobile TV only 12% want PVR capabilities. Linking that into a comment from Texas Instruments at the breakfast, who said that by 2010 handsets would have 100 GB of storage, enough to record a month of programming so people don't have to miss broadcast shows. If the storage is that good 3G TV solutions will improve because they can be stored on the handset and watched later in higher quality, without the jumping and pixilation they currently have. Wills took a dig at the 3G services, saying "the fact of the matter is the carriers are making a lot of money on it because no-ones watching...they don't measure in terms of hours per day, but in views per week". He said 30% of the people who subscribe don't watch the service at all, or watch it at most once a week, while another 60% watch 1-4 times a week.

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