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.
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