Northern Sky Research: Mobile TV to Represent Vital Subscriber and Revenue Generator for Mobile Carriers

According to a new report from Northern Sky Research, "mobile TV will represent an increasingly compelling content offering to mobile subscribers and will enable new methods to deliver video programming and advertisements to consumers." The firm lists the usual host of factors that will contribute to this and "expects mobile TV to reach 107 million subscribers by 2010."

Christopher Baugh at Northern Sky Research (NSR) said, "This market is still in its infancy, and no company has developed a business case that is both commercially available and overwhelmingly profitable. NSR does believe that mobile TV will be a significant revenue generator over the long run, as users increasingly demand mobile services such as video. Several business and technical issues are still not resolved, however, and resolution of these critical issues is vital to ultimate market success."

NSR predicts that "3G-enabled mobile TV will dominate the market for at least the next 2-3 years" as it "will take time for broadcast networks to be deployed and handsets made available."

Regarding the broadcast technologies, MediaFLO, DVB-H and DMB, "NSR does not expect a clear winner in this space to be identified for many years, as it will take some time for operators to trial and deploy technology, in addition to ensuring widespread availability of handsets."