If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from all the mobile TV trials in the last year or so, it’s that users aren’t very interested in paying for the stuff. In just the last couple of weeks:
. Toshiba said it will shutter its Mobile Broadcasting Corporation in Japan – at a cost of nearly a quarter-million dollars – citing a failure to find an audience amid a host of free competing offerings.
. An effort to deliver a video subscription service in Germany fizzled after carriers reportedly balked at supporting DVB-H, opting instead to offer phones that receive DVB-T broadcasts at no charge.
. The BBC said it is hoping to resume 3G broadcasts at bargain-basement rates after a 12-month trial that saw “limited” daily reach (peaking at just 580 viewers in June 2007) and a monthly average consumption of just 13 minutes per month.
. And a one-day audit of DMB usage in Korea – a hotbed of mobile-phone usage – by TNS Media found that overall viewership was a mere 1.17% of consumers, with roughly 3.6% tuning in during the evening commute.
MobiTV provided one of the few bright spots on the landscape, notching its 4-millionth subscriber. But even that news was tempered by the service’s slowing growth: the company took 10 months to add its latest million customers, but its expansion from 2 million to 3 million users required only eight months.
So is mobile TV dead on arrival? Well, yes – at least in terms of using a phone to watch traditional broadcasts. It’s become clear that users aren’t interested in shelling out $10 or $15 a month to watch David Letterman or “The Office” on a tiny screen while on the go.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s no interest in wireless video. Mywaves appears to be gaining traction with an ad-supported service that delivers Internet-based video content to mobile phones, and place-shifting technologies such as Sling Media’s SlingBox continue to find an audience among early adopters looking to watch their home TV broadcasts on wireless devices – free.
The problem, according to a new Parks Associates report, is “an obvious chicken-and-egg obstacle” where users are loath to pay for a new service, and won’t be exposed to mobile video unless they do. So the key, it seems, is to tap the advertising dollars that have always supported television, and to leverage both user-generated content and premium offerings to get consumers to tune in. Because in the era of YouTube and Hulu.com, convincing users to open up their wallets for any kind of video is a tall order. Asking them to do it for traditional TV on a postage-stamp screen seems doomed to fail.
