According to a new Berg Insight report - Mobile TV Broadcasting - mobile TV is set to permeate the largest device and communications market in the world.
Berg Insight’s analysis reveals that there were an estimated 820 million PCs in the world and 1.5 billion TV sets at the end of 2006. There were also around 2.7 billion people using mobile phones.
TV is no longer a set stream of programs pushed out through an open-ended channel where unknown people might or might not be sitting at home watching, but the targeted transmission of hand-picked content at a time and place selected by an identified viewer.
Cameras embedded in mobile phones has created “citizen journalismâ€, turning anybody on the scene into a make-shift TV-team, with amateur videos and images captured by cell-phone users now regularly featured in professional mass media.
Commercial programs and services completely based on amateur content have also appeared. There is every reason to believe that this development will continue and progress on mobile TV, with the mobile phone being not simply the tool for creating content, but also to edit, broadcast, see, share, manipulate and influence it.
However, all this will depend on the ability of broadcasters, content producers, advertisers, mobile operators and handset makers to meet the technical challenges as well as those of managing the cultural shift and merging of these different media worlds onto a new platform.
Berg Insight warns both operators and broadcasters against seeing mobile TV as merely television on a mobile terminal. There are a number of fundamental differences in expectations and behaviours between the regular TV viewer and the mobile user, and services based on simply regurgitated TV-content will be nothing more than TV on a very small screen.
This report discusses the different issues and challenges involved and gives recommendations for different actors on how to explore and develop these possibilities.
Click here to see an overview of the report and the table of contents.
Published: October 2007
Pages: 150
Report price:
Paper copy - €1,500
PDF (1-5 users) - €2,250
PDF (corporate licence) - €4,500
