"That isn't to say there isn't a market for mobile entertainment. In fact, it's likely to be a huge market -- it's just that it has to be built on the foundation of communication and interaction, rather than broadcast. This is in the form of communicating with each other for entertainment purposes, interactive gaming, file sharing and other forms of entertainment that actually take into account that the user is mobile and connected -- rather than stationary and isolated. Simply moving entertainment to a mobile device and calling it mobile entertainment is missing the point. If there's no reason for that entertainment to be mobile, there's no reason anyone's going to be willing to pay anything extra to get it."
Strong point in this article on mobile TV. Reminds me of some articles on the 2-to-2 nature of most mobile content. Meaning, people on the sending and receiving side of mobile content would like to show it to someone nearby in some cases. And this resonates with the upcoming market of near field communication (NFC) of Philips which allows for short range 'sharing' of mobile entertainment without compromising copyright concerns. The mobile device might be an isolated experience in some cases but the true potential of it is only reached by digging into the social nature of it, meaning interactive TV, live chats during mobile TV broadcasts etc.
Telecom Italia, Vodafone and 3 already offer TV streaming over cellular networks. But personally, I believe the current trials concerning DVB-H and DMB are more promising relative to the GPRS, UMTS and 3.5G solutions. Broadcasting technology is cheaper, more efficient, offers less congestion and will offer a more robust user experience relative to cellular networks in my view. Indeed, Strategy Analytics estimates that mobile broadcast networks will have acquired around 51
million users world-wide by 2009, generating around $6.6 billion (€5.2
billion) in revenue. Nokia is running several mobile TV trials and
plans to launch commercial devices and services in 2006. In a survey
sponsored by Nokia and some other companies in Germany last year, 78%
of the 512 respondents regarded mobile TV as a good or excellent idea. Unfortunately, these figures do not focus on the social dimension of mobile TV as stated above.
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