The Wireless Report

We've posted quite a few times recently about the quandary that seems to surround what has become known as "mobile television". Now, this can take many forms from the customer's eyes -- it can mean:

• Watching television clips while mobile using your mobile phone device or handset
• Watching real-time, streaming television from multiple sources -- on demand -- anytime you wish using your mobile device
• Watching pre-recorded television and/or video downloaded from your wireless device directly, or transferred from a PC

All of these scenarios require these things from the customer:

• You must pay undivided attention to what you are watching - unlike audio, you need your eyes and ears for mobile TV
• You must have pretty decent vision to be watching mobile TV or video on a screen the size of what is commonly found on most wireless phones
• You must be willing to pay a set fee or a per-channel or per-clip fee for what you may be able to directly download (in most cases)

We bring up this idea of mobile television because there seems to be a huge amount of confusion from all angles -- some industry pundits think this is the next "ringtone" service that will be easily monetized by the cellular carriers (which I doubt highly), there are industry veterans who think the bandwidth for mobile television and video is not even close to enough to feed even a small audience (we'll get to DVB-H and MediaFLO later), and then there's the folks who have a hard time believing that mobile television will ever get past the "early adopter" crowd or the niche techie crowd -- which limits its potential drastically if the customer growth cannot scale like a service such as text messaging -- which is hugely popular these days (finally) in the U.S. and, of course, globally.

How should mobile television be priced? Are existing offerings like Cingular TV, Sprint TV, MobiTV (offered by Sprint and Cingular) and Verizon's VCast adequate? Do these existing services bode well for the future of mobile television? I, for one, won't really look at mobile television seriously as something I will pay for unless it's 30fps (frames per second), clear, audible and a very fruitful choice of content is offered. So far, mobile television (if it can be called that) is not even close to this. Sure, there are nichy channels such as MTV, Disney, HBO Mobile and so forth -- but long term, do customers want to experience (and pay for, again, most likely) their favorite shows on a postage-stamp screen? Ok, a big stamp -- but a cellphone screen is no television screen.

Upcoming standards such as DVB-H (in Europe right this second) and Qualcomm's MediaFLO (especially) want to take the cellular bandwidth part of the equation and bypass it, by using the same handset you will already by carrying and sending mobile television directly, as a rights-enabled broadcast, to your wireless device -- and thus, not using precious wireless bandwidth and resources that would be overwhelmed if millions of subscribers (heck, just a few million) were to try and use mobile television over existing cellular networks. This is probably a great technical solution, but the main question still stands: will customer demand develop for this kind of service en masse? What's the value proposition for this from the carrier's end, or the content producer's end?

What do you think? We'll all see in the next 24 to 36 months, I'm sure. I may revisit this post in angry disgust at being so wrong or in happy glee as having seen the future of what customers really want from their wireless devices. After all, Apple Computer did not introduce a "video iPod" (or the "iPod with Video", to be specific) until just recently, and they are having success selling videos, albeit on a bigger screen with ample onboard storage -- a far cry from a cellphone screen and streaming over the air.

What's your bet?