NTL launches first broadcast TV service to mobiles

Virgin Mobile,which is now part of the cable company NTL, will next week produce its latest attempt to attract new customers and retain existing users, with the launch of a mobile TV service.

Operated by BT's Movio unit, it will be Britain's first proper broadcast mobile TV service, and it will offer several UK digital terrestrial channels.

The channel line-up will be announced next week, but during a trial of the service within the M25, in southern England, last year, participants were offered a selection including Sky News, Sky Sports News, E4, ITV2 and the Blaze music channel. Customers will need to have a home TV licence for the service.

As it makes use of part of the existing digital radio spectrum, the service will allow anyone with a compatible handset to listen to hundreds of digital radio stations.

Results from last year's trial suggest radio, rather than a limited number of TV channels, is more attractive to the public. At the end of a six-month trial, 59% of the participants rated mobile television as "appealing" or "very appealing", while 65% said the same of digital radio. Those taking part watched an average of 66 minutes of television a week on their phone but listened to 95 minutes of radio.

Virgin Mobile's research showed that most users were willing to pay about £5 a month, though a figure of up to £8 was acceptable to some.

In the face of fierce price competition in the core voice-telephony and text markets, mobile phone firms are on a quest to find services that will either generate new revenue or cut costs by preventing customers defecting to other networks. Virgin Mobile and Orange are already bundling residential broadband internet access, and O2 and Vodafone are poised to follow suit. Several operators, including Vodafone and 3, already offer streamed or downloaded television services over their "next-generation 3G" networks.

High take-up of such services could lead to capacity constraints. So mobile phone operators have been looking at variants of traditional broadcast TV which will require investment in infrastructure but not jeopardise existing networks.

The Virgin Mobile service will only be able to offer about six channels because of bandwidth restrictions. O2, which, in Oxford, has been testing a Nokia-backed broadcast standard called DVB-H, offered 16 channels. Participants spent an average of four hours a week watching mobile TV.

Richard Wray
Thursday August 31, 2006
(c) The Guardian

Technorati tags: mobile TV, 3G, DVB-H