Disconnect Between Mobile TV Offerings And Consumer Expectations

BroadGroup Tariff Services has released a report arguing that “current Mobile TV pricing and marketing models fall short in meeting customer requirements”. The report, Pricing and Marketing Mobile TV, is based on interviews with mobile operators and supplier organisations around the world and highlights the marketing and tariffing strategies of the companies, but it doesn’t indicate where it obtained its consumer expectations to compare them to. It does say that “the survey shows pricing packages for mobile TV is currently offered by 61 operators”, which is an interesting figure to know.
Margrit Sessions, Managing Director of BroadGroup Tariff Services, said that many operators simply rechanneld a particular TV channel, and this “is simply unattractive to users”.
Half the mobile TV offerings are based on a 1-month subscription, but “only Vodafone in Germany offering monthly bundles including minutes (60, 120 and unlimited) for both its Live TV! and Adult services”. I’m not sure whether that’s a Germany-specific quote, or whether it includes operators that don’t charge extra for data use on their mobile TV service, but the general point is valid—unless operators do a special deal data charges will kill any 3G mobile TV service.
Finally, some bad news for the operators: “While operators are tending to offer low tariffs to encourage mobile TV adoption, the long term trend is a price decline.” That being said, there’s no indication where the prediction come from. Following on, “advertising will become an increasingly important element of mobile TV revenues, but current expectations from mobile operators appear very ambitious. Advertisers remain unconvinced of the benefits, although they will experiment with several different business models”.

Technorati tags: mobile TV