| On-demand will kill live mobile TV1st July 2008 It's been reported that Channel 4 is looking to launch mobile TV channels on the forthcoming national commercial DAB multiplex -- dubbed 'Digital Two' -- that was meant to be launching this month, but which has been delayed until next year at the earliest (I concur with Fru Hazlitt that it's insane to launch Digital Two at the present time). Channel 4 had originally planned to launch mobile TV channels on Digital Two using the DAB-IP mobile TV standard, but it was forced to shelve its plans when BT, which was the company behind DAB-IP, decided to pull the plug on the DAB-IP standard. BT pulling the plug on DAB-IP also led to the closure of the Virgin Mobile TV service that had been broadcasting on the Digital One multiplex, and its closure was a major factor that led to GCap saying that DAB is "not an economically viable platform" earlier this year, because the closure of Virgin Mobile TV led to Digital One's (GCap owns 63% of Digital One) revenues falling by over £5m per annum, which left Digital One deep in loss-making territory and without any stations wanting to take up the space vacated by the mobile TV channels. But Channel 4 is apparently resurrecting its plans to launch mobile TV on Digital Two, and commenting on this, a senior industry figure close to the 4Digital Group told Brand Republic that: "This will be a massive reassurance to the board, as this capacity is expensive, and, with a guarantee of sale such as this, it removes a lot of worry about the profitability of the multiplex." Channel 4's board and most of the TV executives at C4 had previously been reported as being gainst the £100m move into digital radio due to Channel 4 facing a funding crisis, and that it would look extremely hypocritical for C4 to invest so much into digital radio whilst simultaneously making out that they're skint and they're holding out the begging bowl in the hope that they can receive some of the BBC's TV licence fee money. So if these reports are accurate, then Channel 4's decision to launch mobile TV on Digital Two could have saved the day for Channel 4's move into digital radio and for the Digital Two multiplex.
What planet is Channel 4 on? If Channel 4 thinks mobile TV will turn out to be the saviour of the Digital Two multiplex, they're simply deluding themselves. Despite a lot of people predicting that mobile TV would be the next 'killer app' for mobile phones, consumers have shown very little interest in mobile TV, and BT pulled the plug on DAB-IP precisely because there was so little interest shown in its mobile TV service -- the £10m advertising campaign for the Virgin Mobile TV service only led to 10,000 people subscribing to the service, and when you then add the £5m+ annual transmission costs for the Virgin Mobile TV service, Virgin spent £1,500 per person that subscribed (excluding setup costs and so on), and the subscription was only around £8 per month, or about £100 per year. Why on earth does Channel 4 want to try and replicate this?
Virgin Mobile TV was rubbish - C4's mobile TV will be no better People in the DAB industry tried to explain away the disastrous launch of mobile TV on DAB by saying that it was down to there being only one ugly handset available that could receive DAB-IP broadcasts. That obviously didn't help. But in reality, the only channels available on the Virgin Mobile TV service were BBC News 24, BBC1, ITV1, Channel 4 and E4. Then there was the fact that the picture quality will have been awful, because the total bit rate per channel was less than 90 kbps. In comparison, the BBC is using a bit rate of 400 kbps for the MPEG-4 H.264 video and 116 kbps for the AAC audio for BBC iPlayer streams available on the Apple iPhone -- over five times the bit rate used for the mobile TV channels on DAB! The reason for the limited number of channels and the low bit rates was that Ofcom only allows 30% of a DAB multiplex's capacity to be used for "non-audio services" (and the government and Ofcom increased the figure from 20% to 30% specifically for the launch of the Virgin Mobile TV service), so the same capacity limit would also apply to C4's mobile TV service.
On-demand is going to wipe out live mobile TV The availability of the BBC iPlayer on-demand TV streams on mobile phones has convinced me that mobile TV services carrying live TV channels will never become popular, because I think on-demand TV viewing is just far and away better suited to watching TV on mobile phones than watching live TV channels will ever be. For example, a major drawback with mobile TV services that carry live TV channels, is that people will usually watch mobile TV in the daytime. But think about what's on TV in the daytime: it's daytime TV -- nightmare of all nightmares! Who on earth wants to watch Bargain Hunt or one of the various house-buying / house-renovating programmes that dominate the daytime TV schedules on your mobile phone? The only kinds of channel that would be suited to mobile TV viewing no matter what time you want to watch are the 24-hour rolling news channels and music TV channels, but even news programmes would be better-suited to on-demand viewing, because users could start watching from the beginning rather than possibly having to watch the end piece about the fire brigade rescusing a cat stuck up a tree followed by the weather before the time reaches half-past or the top of the hour. And with on-demand TV, commuters could watch near enough whatever programme they want to watch rather than the tripe that's being shown at the time, and they can then watch the remainder of the programme at home on the iPlayer, 4oD or ITV.com.
More smartphones to get the iPlayer Although the iPlayer TV streams are only available on the iPhone at the moment, support for other smartphones is expected to be provided within the next few months, with the Nokia N-Series smartphones expected to receive support first due to the number of people that own one, and the fact that they have an integrated web browser, as this means that the BBC only needs to provide streams using audio and video formats that the handset supports without having to provide streams tailored for individual devices. The BBC has also said in its recently-published "Statement of Programme Policy" document, which broadly outlines what the BBC is planning to do over the next 12 months, that providing iPlayer content on mobile devices is a priority:
Smartphones sales have risen sharply over the last couple of years, and they now make up a sizeable percentage of all handset sales in developed countries. Smartphone sales are also predicted to continue growing for the next few years, which will largely be down to the success of the iPhone and other manufacturers bringing out handsets to try and compete with the iPhone, and some analysts have predicted that smartphones will become the norm over the next few years.
Mobile broadband will become better value-for-money The cost of streaming iPlayer TV programmes via 3G would be significant at the moment due to the relatively high bit rates of 500 kbps per stream (the 1st generation iPhone only allows iPlayer streams to be received via Wi-Fi, which was due to it not supporting 3G), but it will become much more affordable over the next few years due to new mobile phone standards being released, such as an upgrade to the HSDPA standard, which is the technology that has made mobile broadband so much more affordable. The upgrade to HSDPA is called HSPA Evolved, and we should start to see it being rolled out over the next year or so, and then there's the 3.9G moble technologies such as 3G LTE (Long Term Evolution), and then true 4G technologies to come after that. The introduction of these faster mobile technologies, in particular 3.9G and 4G, will have the same effect on mobile broadband as moving from dial-up to ADSL did for fixed-line broadband, because the technologies are so much more efficient for the mobile phone networks, and therefore so much cheaper in terms of cost per bit delivered, that the mobile phone networks will be able to provide higher download caps for the same money, which is what's needed for on-demand TV viewing to grow. The mobile phone networks aren't exactly charities, but they will be able to increasingly compete with fixed-line broadband due to mobile broadband being much more flexible for people to use, so it will be in their own best interests to provide affordable packages.
Channel 4 would have to use the DMB standard If Channel 4 does launch mobile TV on the Digital Two multiplex, now that DAB-IP is no more, the service would have to use the DMB standard instead, because DMB is the only other DAB-based mobile TV standard. However, Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, said last year that she would take legal action to force broadcasters to use DVB-H for mobile TV, which is a European standard, whereas DMB is a South Korean-based standard:
It'll be interesting to see what Ms Reding has to say if Channel 4 does launch mobile TV using DMB...
| ||||||||||||||||
Digg
del.icio.us
Reddit
Facebook
Google
Stumbleupon
Slashdot