Hurdles seen blocking potential of mobile phone TV

Television viewed on mobile phone handsets could be a huge revenue generator for the telecoms sector but significant hurdles stand in the way, industry players and analysts said Thursday.

Issues such as handset costs, handset capability and delivering the content wanted by mobile users have yet to be worked out, they said.

"There is potential but also a lot of questions," said Claudio Checchia, a research manager with research firm IDC. "So you will see a lot of experiments."

The cost of TV-capable handsets was an example of the hurdles the service faced, he said.

A subsidiary of US wireless titan Qualcomm, MediaFLO Technologies, began television broadcasts to Verizon mobile telephones around a year ago and says mobile television can be the new "prime time" for the industry.

"When handset subscribers were polled about what's the most important features on their phones, they rank voice as one and being able to watch video on their devices as second," said Qualcomm MediaFLO's Mazen Chmaytelli.

Chmaytelli, senior director for business development with Qualcomm MediaFLO Technologies, was speaking Wednesday on the sidelines of CommunicAsia, a regional technology trade exhibition that ends Friday in Singapore.

With half of the world's population owning cellular devices, content providers are realising they have "many eyeballs" in their target base, said Chmaytelli.

"This dwarfs any household penetration of TV so if you look at that target penetration from a business perspective, there is a lot of things you could do to go ahead and gather these eyeballs," he said.

Colin Miles, executive vice president with i-POP Networks, a mobile media services company, said the type of content offered to mobile users is important, and another challenge faced by mobile TV.

"It is always going to be the content... the question is, how it is going to be consumed?" asked Miles.

© 2008 AFP

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