NEW YORK—Roughly 4 million U.S. consumers will subscribe to mobile broadcasts from dedicated, multimedia networks such as Qualcomm Inc.’s MediaFlo by the end of next year, according to new figures from ABI Research.
The market research firm predicted that carriers will increasingly look to dedicated networks to offload traffic for data-heavy applications such as streaming audio and video. The worldwide market for mobile television services will grow to 514 million subscribers by 2011, ABI said, 460 million of which will use broadcast services from non-cellular networks.
“The presence of as few as five users simultaneously receiving unicast content from a single cellular base station carrier band can seriously degrade data access for those subscribers,” according to Ken Hyers, a senior analyst for ABI Research. “This is further confirmation that broadcast is the only way to get mass-market uptake of these services. Already, the market is bearing out that broadcast is the essential method for offering these services.”
MediaFlo—which Qualcomm is spending $800 million to build—is expected to come online earlier next year, and Verizon Wireless has already committed to using the network. Crown Castle International Inc. and Aloha Partners are each investing $500 million in their own multimedia wireless networks, but neither company has inked a carrier customer, and analysts question whether enough U.S. subscribers will be interested in mobile music and video to support three nationwide networks.
