Mobile Video and TV Not Ready For Primetime

Both Forrester and In-Stat released research this week that pretty much corroborated all the other analyst research out there so far - there is lackluster interest in watching video on mobile phones.

Forrester analysts Charles Golvin and Michelle de Lussanet found that "among online North American 18-to-21-year-olds, at most 8 percent say they would pay to watch some form of video on their phones, regardless of the content and pricing scheme. Only 5 percent of European mobile users say that the ability to view video content is a feature they ‘would definitely look for’ in a new phone.”

The survey by In-Stat's David Chamberlain showed similar results. "Only one in eight respondents said they were interested in paying for mobile video. In addition, the handsets of two-thirds of the respondents aren't even capable of receiving mobile video the survey found."

In my mind, there are several gating factors holding back mobile video in the U.S. The slow rollout of 3G networks, the lack of affordable handsets with good, large screens, and the pain of getting video to the device.

My Cingular GPRS data service is way too slow to stream video, but my phone does have a miniSD memory card slot, and I have had success transferring video from my PC to my 512MB card. Viewing video on the small 1 3/4" x 1 1/2" screen isn't very good, and the whole process of ripping a DVD, encoding it and then transferring it requires multiple applications and too much time and effort.

Ultimately it's the journey itself that makes it worthwhile, and the ability to impress my kid's friends by showing them Napoleon Dynamite on my phone. I haven't actually watched anything in its entirety on my phone yet. For now, I think I'll stick to the ten-foot experience my living room offers...

via TelecomWeb - Forrester
via Mobile Pipeline - In-Stat