Over the last few months, various market developments have spawned a new dynamic in the broadcast mobile TV marketplace. With the European Commission favouring DVB-H as the pan-European broadcast mobile TV standard, AT&T abandoning Modeo and DVB-H in favour of MediaFLO, and Crown Castle’s subsequent divestiture of Modeo’s spectrum, the lines defining a strong regional base for various standards are becoming clear.
IMS Research is forecasting that by 2011 the Americas region will account for 60% of worldwide FLO subscribers. Similarly, Europe is forecast to claim 61% of worldwide DVB-H/ DVB-SH subscribers. Other standards, such as T-DMB and ISDB-T, are also expected to become increasingly region-specific between 2007 and 2011, with an increasing number of these standards’ subscribers coming respectively from Korea and Japan.
Anna Hunt, Research Director at IMS Research, comments in a prepared statement, “Operator and government decisions about which mobile TV standard to deploy in each country or region depend on a number of variables including spectrum availability, existing cellular and DTT infrastructure, market needs, and national political and economic interests. This has resulted in a situation where in certain regions, different standards gained a distinct advantage in building the consensus required to deploy a broadcast network, thereby gaining the first-mover advantage so key in a standards war.”
