Local Broadcast Mobile TV Harder Proposition Than General Broadcast Mobile TV

Broadcast mobile TV is one of the most controversial technologies around, in terms of whether it will work or not. El Reg has a commentary post suggesting that mobile TV will be popular once people get used to watching video on their handsets by downloading it over P2P and sideloading it to the phone. Earlier this week the Open Mobile Video Coalition suggested that the local mobile ad TV market in the US will be worth $2 billion by 2012, apparently on an optimistic prediction of TV going to 345 million devices in the near future. Shelly Palmer takes issue with the prediction, arguing that the only way the local networks will be able to fit mobile TV into the spectrum they have is by degrading their HDTV signal.

He also raises the issue of getting carriers to offer handsets compatible with the service (which competes with their own mobile TV offering), and claims that local broadcast mobile TV will have trouble adding advertiser revenue because of the different way in which they sell advertising: "Local television does not sell ratings, they sell spots. An immeasurably small local mobile audience will not significantly change the number of television households in a DMA. How will local broadcasters profit from the additional audience. Will they attempt to sell spots directly to the handset audience? Who will reformat the ads? Could a local advertiser, who can't afford to make a regular :30 second spot for themselves, possibly afford to create a :15 for ten different handsets?"

RCR News is also reporting on the NAB conference earlier this week, quoting industry execs as saying that "if there is something that people want to watch, you can broadcast it on a rock in the desert and they will watch it"...the "content is king" mantra.

In my opinion mobile TV will be successful in some format, but I think there's going to be a lot of failed business models before the successful ones are found.

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