Australian Mobile TV Bigger Than Pay TV By Xmas

(c) MocoNews

Some TV programs in Australia may have a bigger audience on mobile phones than on pay TV services as early as the end of this year…"We've got tremendous distribution now through 3G phones," said Managing director of MTV Australia Dave Sibley. "By the end of the year the same number of people will be viewing on mobile phones as we have watching on TV."
This is largely due to the relatively low penetration of pay TV in Australia -- 1.71 million homes, out of a population of just over 20 million (obviously homes often have more than one person in them, but mobile penetration is close or past 100%). So MTV "had no programs with more than 20,000 viewers in last week's national ratings…(and) no program on pay TV had a national audience of 100,000, while the rugby league final on Channel Nine had more than 2.5 million viewers". The view of the pay TV industry is that mobile TV will allow the channels to expand, which makes sense, especially for niche channels like MTV which will be able to sell directly to its target audience.

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