Mobile TV has failed

Very much hyped Mobile TV seems to be doomed. Mobile TV bubble has been busted. Consumer uptake had never met expectations for the mobile TV service. There has been very much worldwide Mobile TV subscriber uptake than projected by many. Separate mobile TV broadcasting networks seems to be doomed to demise in most markets.

DVB-H is nowadays practically useless. The most recent launches of broadcast Mobile TV in Europe show disappointing subscriber uptake so far: Switzerland, the Netherlands and Austria all report only a few thousand subscribers. Some companies operating the DVB-H networks want to kill them already, at least Digita in Finland.

Competing FLOtv that used MediaFLO technology used in USA has also failed. Qualcomm has stopped selling devices that support FLOtv. In October 2010, Qualcomm announced it was suspending new sales of the service to consumers. Consumer uptake had never met expectations for the mobile TV service the company invested hundreds of millions of dollar to create.

Nowadays there are both free and paid option or streaming or downloading video via the mobile Web and applications. There does not seem to be consumer need for the mobile TV vision the companies working on the field had few years ago in USA and in Europe.

9 Comments

  1. doomsday for todd's blog says:

    Tomi Engdahl -
    Why listen to your ridiculous negativity, Mobile TV has been very successful. A shame you don’t do your research! Usually things that fail don’t keep growing and getting bigger and more robust. But the failure is yours, well, unless you’ve put that bribe money to good use from the cable companies paying you off to write this crap, since they are afraid of failing to free broadcast tv and interactivity in the living room which will totally bankrupt their strangehold on government and the public.

    Reply
    • tomi says:

      Can you give me examples of where the Mobile TV has been very successful?

      Lately the news have been pretty much filled with the failings….
      The cable companies are not paying me off to write this.

      I an agree with this report and many other similar:
      http://www.international-television.org/archive/2009_03_adl_report_mobile_tv.pdf
      Mobile TV services based on broadcast networks have been launched in many
      markets worldwide, but subscriber uptake and revenue growth was rather
      disappointing so far. At the same time, Mobile TV via 3G streaming, a service
      offered by most mobile operators, has so far not become more than
      a niche market.

      Reply
  2. Tomi says:

    Article at http://www.prosessori.fi/uutiset/uutinen2.asp?id=57144
    says that 23% of TeliaSonera LTE mobile data users look TV/videos though the network.

    Reply
  3. Tomi says:

    http://www.digitoday.fi/yhteiskunta/2011/09/08/suomi-kuoppaa-dvb-h-tekniikan/201112662/66?rss=6

    DVB-H broadcasting will stop in Finland.
    Digita has got permission to stop broadcasts using DVB-H mobile TV technology and use the same same frequency allocation in the future for DVB-T2 broadcasts.

    According to http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-H Finland was the last country that had active DVB-H in operation at this time.

    It seems to me that DVB-H mobile TV is pretty much dead now…

    Reply
  4. AaHmot Scv says:

    This will allow you to enjoy music, movies and photos from your computer, camera and mobile devices, on your TV screen…. So it has BD-Live support.A Mobile Tv is in my Pocket

    Reply
  5. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Nokia is trying mobile TV in a new way:

    Nokia TV comes today

    Nokia TV-named application works only for Nokia’s Windows Mobile phones, Nokia, and it is trying to separate Lumia-phone with other Windows-based device manufacturers in mass.

    - The application should be first in the world to Finland, because there are good online TV services and high speed access, said Nokia’s Entertainment Services, Director of Jyrki Rosenberg on Thursday at the press conference.

    - We want to Finland to learn more through the pilot, but I do not want to say anything about other countries’ launches

    This application can be used to view Yle Arena, MTV3 and Channel Four Katsomo Screen TV services. In addition, the range of music channel The Voice and the sports channel URHOtv’s online TV services.

    The service requires a 3G or wireless network connection. Programs can not be saved to your phone for copyright reasons.

    - Nokia does not have an application’s business interest other than to make easy for consumers of services, Rosenberg said.

    Nokia partners YLE and MTV3 expect an application from the download rates through the moving tens of thousands of copies in the first year.

    TV companies try to show all their content, but especially the Hollywood variety series are missing.

    Source:
    http://www.itviikko.fi/uutiset/2012/05/25/nokia-tv-tulee-tanaan/201230128/7

    Reply
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  7. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Shift over, TV firms: LTE Broadcast will nuke current mobile telly tech
    Operators love the idea – the reality’s a whole new ballgame
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/23/lte_broadcast_mobile_operators_may_yet_get_it_wrong/

    Telephone companies could supplant television companies as the source of goggle-box fodder, says mobile gear-maker Ericsson as it promotes the new mobile LTE Broadcast specification.

    Unlike traditional mobile phone communication, which is one-to-one, LTE Broadcast sends the same data to many people.

    LTE Broadcast has the full bandwidth of a 4G connection – which is easily good enough for HD video streams.

    All people in a cell can watch the same video at the same time.

    There is certainly a need for it when massive traffic volumes are generated by large sporting events such as the World Cup.

    With LTE Broadcast, viewers can be flipped between broadcast and unicast so advertisements can be targeted to individual viewers, and while it’s essentially live TV there is a caching mechanism which allows an element of catch up if a phone drops out of coverage.

    The technology has three components: eMBMS, HEVC and Mpeg-DASH.

    eMBMS, stands for Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service and is the over-the-air bit which sends the signal to lots of users at once

    HEVC stands for High Efficiency Video Coding, which is a new video compression standard

    MPEG-DASH, or Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. HEVC supports the use of a common player on a device and a live head-end encoder system for both unicast and broadcast.

    Reply

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