Will DTT emerge as mobile TV victor?

In response to early mobile-TV developments in South Korea and Japan, the US and Europe started to develop indigenous mobile-TV standards as competitive industrial responses.

But the upfront infrastructure investments were always daunting even before taking account of spectrum-auction fees. Now, with the global credit crunch, the investment looks even more challenging. At the same time, soaring power prices mean that transmission costs are also rising.

Despite some optimistic field-trial results, the pay-business model for mobile TV always looked challenging and consumer take-up has been relatively low. The problem is that while mobile-telephone customers pay for voice, SMS, ringtones and mobile broadband “dongles” (now a popular DSL substitute), everything else is perceived to be “free”: cameras, WiFi, FM radio, games and MP3 players (with the notable exception of Apple).

South Korea provided the perfect testing ground for mobile-television delivery systems and business models: free versus pay and terrestrial versus satellite. By February 2008, the six-channel free terrestrial T-DMB had around 10 million customers and the 19-channel TU Media pay-satellite service had only 1.3 million customers, far short of the three million subscribers it needs to break even.

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