@Napte Mobile++: Mobile TV/Video Usages Soaring—Telephia

(c) MocoNews

I missed the 5 minute Telephia presentation yesterday, but Levi Shapiro (director of audience metrics) was nice enough to meet with me and go over it agan. The big figure he mentioned was a prediction for the uptake of mobile video/TV in the US for the fourth quarter of 2006—more than 6 million subscribers and $250 million in revenue. That’s a lot more than many people were expecting...it’s taken from scraping bills rather than a survey methodology.
He did have figures for Q3 (5.1 million subscribers, $140.7 million in revenue) and Q2 (3.69 million subscribers and $85.8 million in revenue), and the figure that the market for mobile video and TV more doubled from Q1 to Q3 last year. These are pretty good figures—in the third quarter there was a 2.3 percent penetration of mobile video/TV and the average revenue per mobile video/TV subscriber was $10.21. Which means about a third of the revenue is from subscribers and two thirds is from download purchases.
Mobile video/TV has passed mobile games in terms of revenue (but not in terms of penetration or subscribers), games has been sitting around 7 percent penetration for a few quarters and audio at around 11 percent. If the mobile TV/video penetration can approach that of mobile audio it will be a viable business.
Another interesting statistic—70 percent of mobile video/TV usage is from males, whereas other content such as games, ringtones and wallpapers are used mostly by females. Also, 82 percent of users watch for more than five minutes at a time. The average viewing time isn’t much use, being skewed by the 11 percent of users watching for more than two hours or more at at time—Shapiro opined that these people aren’t really watching, they have an unlimited plan and have the service running while they do other things on the phone, or just leave it running on a table.
Other figures were are familiar (African Americans and Hispanics use it more than Caucasians, it’s often used in the home)...there’s also some figures on reach—the weather Channel reaches 88 percent of the handsets of people who use mobile TV and video, Fox Sports 88 percent and ESPN 68 percent. This isn’t how many people use the service, mind. Interestingly only six channels are actually accessible on the handsets of more than 50 percent of mobile TV/video users. The download figures are different, the most popular times are comedy, music and entertainment...although you would expect people to stream immediate things like weather and news and download things like music and entertainment.

Technorati tags: mobile TV