Yoram Soloman, the president of the Mobile TV Alliance (a new group supporting DVB-H), says consumers still need to "get" the concept of mobile television, according to an article in Electronic News.
"People still don’t get it. They didn’t get iPods, they didn’t get Blackberry, they didn’t get a lot of things until they held them in their hands," he says.
"You need a tipping point, something you really, really want to watch when you can’t be home," says Soloman, who also is senior director of strategic marketing and industry standards for Texas Instrument’s mobile connectivity solutions.
Little bits of mobile TV
Soloman explains, "You don’t watch a 30 minute show on mobile TV. You watch two or three minute chunks from CNN, CNBC or ESPN.
"It’s the same thing as Blackberry. If you have two free minutes, you check your e-mail. Now, you’ll watch TV."
For the most part, I think that's true. I've watched mobile television on a variety of handsets and most people aren't going to spend much time watching videos on a small screen with relatively poor resolution.
However, many people are willing to watch "one hour" (about 43 minutes without commercials) television programs on Apple's video-enabled iPods -- a fact I mentioned previously and will continue to mention. Cellular phones with better, larger screens will stimulate interest in watching mobile TV for longer periods at a stretch.
It takes time
The World Cup has generated a huge amount of hype as being, supposedly, a major event to stimulate the use of mobile TV, as I've written before. I guess when the matches are over we'll learn exactly how much interest and how many revenues the soccer championship generated.
Currently the quality of World Cup mobile TV is generating mixed reviews, ranging from good to watch because of good quality videos to a poor experience because of delayed programs and "stuttering" performance.
Soloman says if the World Cup isn't going to be the major "tipping point" there will be other opportunities -- such as the Super Bowl -- to spark consumer interest. "There aren’t a lot of technologies that come out and people get right away," he says.
"If this isn’t the tipping point, there will be something else. The big thing is just putting it [mobile TV] in their hands."
I think most analysts agree. It can take a long time, ten years or longer, for a critical mass of consumers to adopt certain technologies.
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