"Wheelock supports mobile TV, thinking that people's fundamental "desire to have anytime, anywhere access" to TV will drive demand. And he is sure the quality of the services will improve. But he and other analysts admit cellular networks will get to a point where they will not be able to support multiple audio-visual streams without impairing voice calls and other traffic on the network. This is where the mobile broadcast networks come in -- networks to go live in the United States and Europe by late 2006, or early 2007. According to Pyramid Research, it costs between $150,000 and $400,000 to set up a cell site from scratch. A U.S. operator might have 25,000 cell sites. Add mobile broadcast capabilities, and the cost could be between $4 billion and $10 billion. That's a lot of money, especially if it is already possible to get TV on the go with services like TiVo, Orb Networks or some other do-it-yourself magic like video podcasting. "The question is whether (demand) justifies a huge investment," said Patel at Strategy Analytics. The answer, he says, is "no.""
Nice article on mobile TV and video from Wired News. The question is whether the above investment is necessary considering the alternative route for mobile TV, meaning broadcast technologies like DVB-H and DMB. I believe it is not. With this technologies fewer 'base stations' are necessary and network congestion can be eliminated for live TV that is. So the rise of mobile TV is more likely, even though it is for niche purposes as highlighted in my previous posts on this topic. On top of that, I strongly believe mobile TV might be killer app when it is embedded in cross media formats/triple play on mobile phones as well as viral/social contexts. The advent of TiVo-2-Go, video podcasting and all technologies enabling networking from your PC to your mobile phone (UWB, WiFi, NFC, etc.) will decrease the market for prerecorded TV or video. But then again, the DRM market might make this decentral synching of video content more difficult supporting the mobile operators. Very interesting playing field...
Comments