NPD Group Blog » Mobile DTV could be a hard cell

Mobile DTV could be a hard cell

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
By Ross Rubin, Executive Director, NPD Connected Intelligence

A few days after the world focuses on my hometown of New York tonight, I’ll be flying toward its Las Vegas simulacrum en route to the Consumer Electronics Show. My colleagues and I will be participating in a number of presentations and roundtable discussions at CES, including:

Make the Connection: Consumers and the Next Era of Digital Living at the NPD/DisplaySearch client cocktail reception
Storage Technology and The Market for Entertainment and Consumer Storage, and Reaching and Informing Consumers and Channel Partners at Storage Visions 2009
The annual TWICE retail roundtable at CES (a closed event)
Delivering on Digital Entertainment, an Industry Report Card at CntrStg
The 2008 Holiday Season: A Giving One or the Grinch? at CES (in the LVCC)
Mobile DTV Primer: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff at CES (in the LVCC)

I’ll be moderating that last panel, which will bring together representatives from the worlds of broadcasting, wireless service providers, and mobile platforms. Most of the attention at CES is on giant screens, but the past year has seen an explosion in PC-based broadband TV and video on sites such as Hulu and those of the major broadcast networks. That’s a dramatic contrast from the walled gardens that have characterized the mobile TV offerings to date from providers such as MediaFLO USA and MobiTV, the latter of which recently passed the 5 million subscriber mark.

Additionally, whereas most of the growth in Internet video on these sites has been focused on on-demand viewing, most of the services aimed at mobile phones (and other portable video platforms via the near-final mobile digital television broadcast standard) have been linear broadcasts. Clearly that’s a sensible approach for news and sports, but consumers today are increasingly becoming accustomed to nearly unlimited choices and having them on-demand. What are the odds that you’ll find “something good on” when you have a few minutes to kill and in an area where you have sufficient coverage. Of course, one popular phone provides on-demand TV shows via sideloading if you’re willing to pay (or use elaborate alternatives).

Some of the broadcasters on MediaFLO respond by time-shifting select programs to provide more alternatives to the soap opera-averse during the day whereas a recent conversation with MobiTV revealed that the company is giving more attention to on-demand video as it has been implemented in its Mobi4Biz offering.

Unlike MobiTV and MediaFLO, broadcasts that use the ATSC mobile DTV broadcast standard will be free and available to other kinds of devices besides cell phones, such as portable DVD and digital video players. In piggybacking onto these product categories, mobile digital TV is poised to reach a broader audience than analog broadcasting did catering exclusively to handheld TVs such as the Sony Watchman. But even free reception may not prove a strong driver to consumer adoption as the challenges of HD Radio has shown.

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