Whatever happened to the great mobile TV revolution?
Six years ago this month I found myself caught up in several scary incidents in London in the wake of the 7/7 bomb attacks. A similar outrage was prevented two weeks later and there was a general atmosphere of fear and confusion in the city.
It was then, when I was out and about, that I first thought about how useful it might be to keep up with developments on a mobile TV device. Tuning in to the BBC or Sky News would at least put me in the picture and help avoid places where there had been bomb scares, for instance.
Well, six years on, at least in the UK, mobile TV hasn’t taken off in the way many people had both hoped and predicted. Instead, if you want the news, you surf the web on your device, 3G reception permitting.
It has also been something of a mixed bag for mobile TV in other parts of Europe. Just this week, the Spanish regulator CMT reported a surge in take-up of services in the first quarter, while earlier this year the Dutch incumbent KPN ditched its DVB-H service, choosing instead to concentrate on the Digitenne DTT operation.
Meanwhile in Central and Eastern Europe, we have just seen Hungary effectively give a thumbs-down to mobile TV by allowing the carriage of DTT channels on its second multiplex. We have also learnt that in Russia, where over one million people now receive mobile TV services, the actual value of the market is still modest, with growth being held back by a number of factors.
Elsewhere, we hear less about mobile TV in such markets as Poland, where the licence to offer services is held by a company named Info-TV-FM. Having failed to reach agreements with the country’s leading mobile operators, it now looks increasingly likely that it will have to go it alone.
While we certainly can’t write off mobile TV in Central and Eastern Europe just yet, its impact on the marketplace will probably be nothing like as great as had once been expected.
