Reiter's Mobile TV Report

Verizon Wireless to offer 100+ live college football games over V CAST Mobile TV

Verizon Wireless will be offering more than 100 college football games broadcast live on the CBS Mobile, ESPN Mobile TV, Fox Mobile and NBC 2Go channels via its streaming V CAST Mobile TV (that still isn’t in available in my Washington, D.C. area!).

The Qualcomm press release says, “ESPN Mobile TV will air more than 75 live match-ups, as well as up to 20 bowl games.  Notre Dame fans can catch seven Fighting Irish games on NBC 2Go and two on ESPN Mobile TV, while highlights of the 2007 season on CBS Mobile will include up to 15 Southeastern Conference games, the Sun Bowl and Gator Bowl, and up to 38 additional college football games covered through CSTV on CBS Mobile.

“Fox Sports Mobile, meanwhile, is the destination of choice for mobile Big 12 fans.”

Mobile TV sports makes sense

Although I personally believe (as I’ve noted before) that watching sports is an example of the stupidity of the human race that wastes time with this inane activity, as a wireless data consultant I certainly understand that sports is a great way to encourage the overwhelming majority of people (who do not share my view) to watch mobile TV.

Indeed, broadcasting live events, as Verizon Wireless is doing, makes complete sense.  As I’ve also written many times before, the future of mobile TV is dependent on broadcasting real-time events and programs, video on demand and both short clips and full-length programs.

An article in Red Herring quotes James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, saying, “The problem is mobile broadcast feels a lot like 1975, with only a handful of channels and no on-demand video viewing.  The best bet for mobile TV is live events about which people are passionate, and college sports are perfect examples.”

Mobile TV advertising also makes sense

John Gauntt, an analyst with eMarketer, says in the article, “The nice thing about sports is that they have schedules and they are not subject to the random interests of the market, so if you are going to break mobile TV out of the gate, sports is a good place to start.”

Gauntt also likes mobile TV as a venue for advertising.  I agree.  There are tremendous opportunities for advertising, ranging from pre–, during– and post-roll commercials to tie-ins with Web sites, voting, instant messaging, etc.

BroadGroup survey shows mobile TV pricing remains static for past six months

BroadGroup Tariff Services, a company that examines telecommunications pricing, reports monthly pricing for mobile television subscriptions have generally remained the same during the past six months.

Cellular operators are offering specific prices for different types of programs, such as sports and music, the company says.  BroadGroup Tariff Services’ survey shows the most popular pricing plan is monthly, followed by a one day plan and then per-minute.

“Plenty of promotional pricing is still around, including offering mobile TV free to either a certain type of customer or anyone, the latter one is typically offered when launching the service,” the company says. 

French broadcaster Canal+ wants broadcasters to pay for mobile TV

The French broadcaster Vivendi’s Canal+ says broadcasting companies should be primarily responsible for financing and distributing mobile television, not cellular operators, according to MocoNews.net.

The reason is that broadcasters want to reap most of the financial gains rather than cellular operators, the article says.  Bertrand Meheut, the head of Canal+, says, “If mobile phone operators pay for the network, they will demand in exchange a substantial part of the payment made by the customer.  Certain TV channels are susceptible to the siren calls of the mobile phone operators because they don't want to pay, but they should be well aware of the risks.”

MocoNews.net notes that Canal+ has been involved in several interactive services.  “Among these was a texting application that let viewers chat to each other alongside programmes on Canal+ channels, and a mobile TV trial in France, running over DVB-H, concluded last year, where Canal+ provided all the content aggregation and ran the platform (SFR provided a return channel for interactivity, and the e-commerce platform for any related transactions).”

The article says most mobile TV services are directed by cellular operators, although there are some broadcaster initiatives.  MocoNews.net points to South Korea, where broadcasters offer free mobile TV compared to the cellular operators’ paid mobile TV — as dictated by the Korean government, as I’ve written previously.

China's CMMB mobile TV slated for 2008 Beijing Olympics with 25 channels

China’s proprietary mobile television standard, China’s Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting (CMMB), is slated to be available in time for the country’s 2008 Beijing Olympics with 25 channels of programs and possibly a Secure Digital (SD) card that can be inserted into cellular phones that won’t have integrated CMMB capabilities, according to an article in Interfax China.

China’s SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television authority) has established a test system in Beijing and is transmitting one CMMB channel.  By the end of this year there should be tests in six cities hosting the events, according to Yang Qinghua, the director of SARFT’s Academy of Broadcasting Science, the article says.

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding SARFT’s decision to support its own mobile TV platform as cellular operators and broadcasters have wondered whether CMMB would be ready in time for the country’s first major mobile TV event and whether China should have just gone with an existing mobile TV standard or standards.

Not year commercial products

Controversy notwithstanding, the article reports that “near-commercial” CMMB products have been developed.  The technology employs satellites and, when coverage isn’t possible, terrestrial towers, to broadcast programs to a variety of devices, such as laptop computers and mp3 players, in addition to cellular phones.

As I’ve written previously in this weblog, some Asian protocols, such as South Korea’s DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting), are broadcast to a variety of devices, sometimes for free.

Innofidei in Beijing has supplied its CMMB demodulator chip to 35 companies, including Lenovo, Samsung and ZTE, reports Interfax China.  Lenovo and Samsung have shown prototype CMMB handsets.  Innofidei has applied for 24 patents in China.

Neonetech in Beijing has developed the SD card CMMB tuner, although it’s not yet in a commercial form, the article reports.

Ernest & Young says 62 percent of Dutch familiar with mobile TV, six percent use it

Consultant Jak Boumans’ “Buziaulane” weblog discusses an Ernest & Young “mediabarometer” report for The Netherlands that says a fair number of people in that country know about the service but relatively few use it.

“No less than 62 pct of the Dutch households are familiar with facility of watching live tv on mobiles.  But only 6 pct of the mobile users are willing to use it,” the weblog says about the report’s brief findings on the Web (in Dutch).  The “mediabarometer” is a quarterly report about media and entertainment based on surveys of 2,000 people.

“Buziaulane” writes about the report:

“1 of the 5 respondents which have a mobile phone, has a UMTS/3G device and is able to view live television streams through internet.  Of this group, however, almost half of the group (47 pct) does watch video scenes on the mobile occasionally.

“Especially they download or stream amateur movies, as can be seen on YouTube, and humour movies are popular.  On average those people spend 15 minutes per session; non 3G users estimate that they will watch video on their mobile phone for 20 minutes.

“Of the group of mobile callers who do not have a 3G telephone, half indicate that they will view videos about news and sports on the mobile.  However the picture of these wannahaves, does not stroke with the habits of present 3G users, as only 6 pct of the users will view live streams from television.”

Skepticism

The weblog article suggests skepticism about the results because the number of 400 respondents with a 3G phone who watch videos 15 minutes a day seems to be high.  “Perhaps the panel existed of early adopters,” Boumans writes.

Based on the newness of mobile TV, it seems logical to me to assume that many of the respondents were indeed early adopters.

Ofcom "Communications Market Report" says few Brits aware of, use mobile TV

A major U.K. government report about the state of wired and wireless communications contains a huge amount of information on a wide range of technologies and applications, including the use — or lack thereof — of mobile television in the country.

The 330–page Office of Communications’ (Ofcom) “Communications Market Report” (available in three sections plus summaries) didn’t devote much space to mobile TV, but the space it did devote indicated mobile TV is way, way down on cellular users’ consciousness and use.

Only ten percent of cellular users surveyed for the report were even aware their phone could play mobile TV.  That’s the lowest percentage of awareness for the 13 features in the survey.  But that’s a high percentage compared to those who actually watched any mobile TV — two percent (see below).

Little value

Based on those statistics, it’s no surprise that the ability to watch short television clips on a cellular phone ranked as the least valuable telecommunications service based on those listed (see below).  Based on a scale of one to five — with “one” being “Not at all valuable” to “five” being “Extremely valuable” — 56 percent of Brits surveyed ranked watching TV clips a “one.” 

Sixteen percent ranked watching short TV clips a “two,” 14 percent, “three” and seven percent, “four.”  The chart above doesn’t show the percentage who ranked it a “five,” but the next chart (see below) shows three percent for the average of all age groups surveyed.  Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Youthful interest

It’s not surprising that younger cellular users are more interested in watching mobile TV clips, although even the best result isn’t much.  The best — ages 15 to 24 — is six percent who gave watching TV clips a “five.”

Fourteen percent ranked it “four,” 21 percent, “three”; 20 percent, “four” and the highest percentage — 35 percent — ranked it a “one.”

Interestingly, another chart that shows awareness of cellular phone capabilities (see below) indicates that 29 percent of consumers surveyed are aware they can download and view video clips and seven percent used the feature.  This compares, as I wrote above, to the ten percent who were aware of mobile TV and two percent who used it,

Marketing, marketing, marketing

I don’t know how many times I’ve written how the United States cellular operators, in general, have done a terrible job of marketing mobile TV.  I’ve also e-mailed and spoken with many types of companies in the mobile TV arena about doing a better job marketing the service through their Web sites, weblogs, podcasts, etc.

My wireless data business is basically business development — helping companies improve their existing offerings or create new ones — and I’ve practically begged companies (whether they’d use my services or not) to do a better (often, even a competent) job of marketing mobile TV.  Just about all shrug.

This month I wrote two articles for the Web site “Mobi-lize,” that I’m helping to develop, about how good a job the cellular operators are doing providing information to consumers about mobile TV in their retail stores and on their Web sites (see below).

I won’t keep you in suspense — for the most part it’s not a pretty picture.

The mobile TV industry certainly has problems that need to be solved as, for example, Continental Research recently noted.  But I’m confident the problems can be solved.  And mobile video is a natural extension of human communications.

Camera phones, entire U.K. telecom world

As you can see from the first chart in this article, awareness and use of cameras in phones — of which I’m also a proponent — fared better than any other feature.  Earlier this evening I posted an article on “Reiter’s Camera Phone Report” about what Ofcom had to say about camera phone awareness and use in the U.K.

As I also noted in that article, if you’re interested in the varied U.K. telecommunications environment — Internet, WiFi, cellular, broadcast/cable television, etc. — check out the entire Ofcom report.  MocoNews.net has a brief summary of it and BBC News has a detailed article about the report’s findings plus two video reports.

French broadcasters, cellular operators ponder free versus paid mobile TV

French media companies and cellular operators are debating whether to offer mobile television that’s free, paid or a combination thereof, says an item in TelecomPaper from Les Echos.

The article (“Television sur mobile: partisans des modeles payant et gratuit s’affrontent”) says French media companies BFM, Bollore, Lagardere and NRJ want to offer free service.  The cellular operators want to offer (surprise, surprise) paid mobile TV for perhaps 5 euros ($6.73) to 15 euros ($20.21) per month.

French cellular operators Bouygues Telecom and Orange want paid mobile TV, the article said.

TelecomPaper says French broadcasters want a combination of free and paid, while Sony has indicated it would like free subscriptions.

Mobile TV licenses

France’s broadcasting regulatory authority CSA (Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel) is slated to issue license requests in October.  CSA says most of the companies that responded to requests for information about mobile TV said they would like at least some paid components. 

Companies also are pondering whether advertising could be used to provide free or less expensive mobile TV services.

Qualcomm considering joint venture in Taiwan to provide mobile TV

Qualcomm is considering establishing a joint venture — technological, financial — with companies in Taiwan to provide Qualcomm’s MediaFLO-based mobile television in that country, DigiTimes reports.

Jeffrey Brown, the head of global strategy and business development at Qualcomm MediaFLO, said in Taipei that Taiwan’s penetration rate for cellular phones is more than 90 percent and more than 80 percent for cable TV.  He said market research conducted by Qualcomm in Taiwan reported that more than 80 percent of the respondents said they would pay $6 – $10 per month to receive up to 20 mobile TV programs.

Brown also said it would be “unhealthy” for the industry to offer mobile TV for free.  If you’ve been following the mobile TV market around the world you know that a few mobile TV offerings are free, such as T-DMB in South Korea, as I posted.

Qualcomm joint ventures

DigiTimes notes that Qualcomm partnered with several Taiwan telecommunications companies — China Network Systems, Vibo Telecom, Asia Pacific Telecom and Taiwan Television Enterprise (TTV) — to obtain a license to test mobile TV in the country.  Tests have already begun, the article says.

Establishing joint ventures isn’t new to Qualcomm.  The article says Qualcomm has a Japanese venture, called MediaFLO Japan Planning, with KDDI.  Qualcomm also is working in Japan with a subsidiary of Softbank, Mobile Media Planning, to offer technology services, according to sources in the article.

As indicated in an IMS Research report I discussed a few days ago, Qualcomm’s MediaFLO is doing well in the United States, Europe is mostly DVB-H territory and Asia is somewhat of a mishmash including T-DMB and ISDB-T.

European Commission offers simpler applications for mobile TV licenses

The European Commission has announced simpler procedures for obtaining mobile television and satellite licenses in Europe, according to an article in Variety.  The EU Parliament and country governments have to approve the procedures.

Licenses would be solicited in 2008 for service in 2009, the article says.

In general terms, license applications have to include such information as coverage, benefits, spectrum efficiency and “fulfillment of public policy objectives.”

Variety reports, “However, the new system is not without its flaws.  Although selection would be at the pan European Union level, successful bidders would still need licenses from all the national authorities covered.  Fees would continue to vary from country to country.”

CBS offers full length episodes of "David Letterman," "Craig Ferguson" over Verizon Videos

CBS Mobile is offering full-length episodes — divided into short segments — of the “Late Show with David Letterman” and the “Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” over Verizon Wireless’ V CAST Video Clips (not its new streaming V CAST Mobile TV), according to Verizon’s press release.

This new CBS Mobile service starts today (Tuesday).  It is available to subscribers “following their nightly CBS broadcasts and will remain accessible until the following night’s broadcasts replace them,” the release says.

Using Verizon’s Samsung SCH-u740 dual mode flip/clamshell camera phone (see below; photo from Nokia N95 five megapixel camera phone using macro mode and flash) that Verizon was nice enough to send me a few months ago (I really must return it!), the new CBS Mobile service worked fine….buffering notwithstanding.

(In my area it’s rare that I can watch more than a few minutes of a Verizon video clip without it stopping and buffering.)

Just a few clicks to go

After fewer than a dozen clicks (yes, I’m being sarcastic), I was able to watch a clip!  Here’s the sequence of clicks, after the phone is turned on:

1.  Click “Menu”

2.  Click “Get It Now”

3.  Click “”Picture & Video”

4.  Click “V CAST Videos”

5.  Click “TV & Film”

6.  Click “CBS Mobile”

7.  Click “Full Length Late Shows”

8.  Click “Full Length Letterman” or “Full Length Ferguson”

9.  Click “Letterman Music” or “Letterman Interviews” or “Letterman Sketches” or “Letterman Monologue”

10.  Click “Jeff Goldblum Interview Pt. 1, “Jeff Goldman Interview Pt. 2” or “Jeff Goldblum Interview Pt. 3”

11.  Watch it!

Not quite in order

As you can see, the shows aren’t listed exactly in order of how they are presented on “regular” television.  You can’t click, for example, on “Letterman, 8/21/07” and watch first the monologue, then an interview with a guest, then another interview, then a musical performance, etc. in order of the appearances.

If you want to see the entire show you have to watch according to the subcategory and click back to the next category.

By the way, for some time CBS Mobile has been offering a selection of individual videos from David Letterman and Craig Ferguson as part of Verizon’s Video Clips.  It just hadn’t offered these “full length” (so to speak) episodes.

Good, but…

I’m glad to see Verizon Wireless isn’t completely ignoring its on-demand video clip service in favor of its sexier V CAST Mobile TV that streams eight different channels (though not always at the time they are broadcast over cable).

Verizon’s Video Clips service, including ESPN and the Internet, costs $15 per month for unlimited viewing or $3 per day (24 hours).  V CAST Mobile TV costs $15 per month for eight channels or $13 per month for four channels (hardly seems worth not paying the extra $2). 

The combination package of V CAST Mobile TV and Video Clips costs $25 per month.

As is evident by my “click list,” it takes a lot of button pushes to get to the video you want.  Why can’t cellular operators — not just Verizon — offer ways to easily create lists of mobile TV favorites with the specific program category and subcategory?

(For more on mobile TV navigation and personalization — or lack thereof — check out my most recent mobile TV article on Mobi-lize, that I’m helping to develop and write.)

Short or long videos?

If you’ve been reading this weblog, you know I’ve written many times that the future of mobile television includes both short clips and long, full length programs.  Many analysts trumpet that only short clips should be offered.  I strongly disagree.

Apparently, Cyriac Roeding, the executive vice president at CBS Mobile, CBS Interactive, thinks the same thing.  He says in the release, “While we continue to provide short clips of our shows, we’re seeing a growing demand for the availability of full length, network quality shows on video on demand mobile video.