Last month at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, industry executives repeated their mantra — “This year will be the year mobile TV takes off” — but it was a familiar refrain and everyone’s getting rather impatient for it to come true.

As a halfway house, mobile phone companies such as 3, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone have for several years offered third-generation (3G) services, which include web and video, such as news and sports clips streamed to the handset. Revenue-share deals with broadcasters such as ITV, Channel 4 and Sky also mean mobile users can access streamed, as opposed to downloaded, video loops or clips of selected programming from these channels or even so-called “simulcasts” of services such as CNN and Sky Sports. These “snackable” video services are “fairly popular,” according to mobile analyst Ronan de Renesse at research firm Screen Digest, “though not exactly mass market yet.”

How popular is often hard to tell, however, says Ben Lister, mobile business development manager at Channel 4.
“Our mobile TV loop has grown from 20 minutes, refreshed every day, to about an hour, comprising the best of Big Brother, Skins and comedies like The IT Crowd. But the technology doesn’t allow us to track how each programme in that loop is rating. The audiences for mobile TV need to be far more measurable, and in 2008 we’d like to see this improve so we can commission the right content and sell ads round it.”

Sporty content

Though unable to give precise ratings for programmes on the 40-plus TV channels streamed via Vodafone Live, the operator’s head of content, Mike Eaton, says some metrics are available, giving some surprising results. “Usage spikes after lunch, during commuter time and late night, possibly due to the pub effect. “Sport is the biggest category, and people do watch live football games on mobile. Cricket is surprisingly popular, with people dipping in and out during the middle of the night to catch up with overseas matches,” he says.

Talk about sport and questions over rights soon arise, and BSkyB’s head of mobile, Tim Satchell, acknowledges the three Sky Sports channels went mobile relatively late, given the rights clearances required. “They joined Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile only last summer but are now the most popular mobile channels in the UK,” he says. “Our new on-demand service, 24/7 Football, launched last August and subscriber numbers are in six figures.”

Rights issues also affect non-sport channels on mobile and often determine what shows are included in the loops. “Around 35% of Channel 4’s schedule is acquired programming, but we don’t have the mobile rights to our best US shows,” says Lister.

“Broadcasters didn’t envisage mobile TV until relatively recently, so they had to do a lot of work clearing the rights for mobile, but blank screens are rare these days,” says Vodafone’s Eaton.

Programme rights

The issue of retaining mobile rights to programming is front of mind for traditional TV broadcasters, given independent suppliers are now guaranteed them by law.

Rights issues aside, the mass uptake of mobile TV is hindered by the fact that 3G technology can only support so many video streams at one time. “If more than 100,000 people watched the Channel 4 loop on Vodafone, their network would suffer tremendously,” says Lister.

However, “its failure hasn’t made the market more pessimistic about mobile TV since the reasons it failed were very specific,” says de Renesse.

The Guardian