Why premium mobile TV needs free-to-air

Free-to-air mobile television is taking off across the globe (depending on whom you ask), but the market for a mobile TV service of any kind still is struggling to gain traction in the U.S. Premium service models still are most prevalent here, but it may take teaming up with their free-to-air counterparts to propel them to the mass market.

In a recent blog post, Howard Wilcox, analyst with Juniper Research, questioned DiBcom CEO Yannick Levy’s claim at Computex that the market for mobile TV would shrink by 20 to 30% this year. Levy said the decline would arise because substantial investment in digital video broadcast to handhelds networks would be needed, but Wilcox sided with fellow vendor Telegent and used it as an example of why Levy is wrong.

As of early January, Telegent already had deployed more than 20 million chipsets and has seen steady growth ever since. The vendor makes free-to-air mobile TV chipsets capable of receiving both analog and digital terrestrial broadcast TV, so that operators don’t need entirely new infrastructure for mobile TV and consumers can get the same programming they do in their living rooms. Consumer demand for this model of mobile TV has continued worldwide, despite the economic downturn, said Diana Jovin, vice president of marketing for Telegent.

While Jovin pointed out the benefits of using free-to-air mobile TV as a way to attract new subscribers and keep the old, Wilcox said that this is the main problem with mobile TV that only replicates the free terrestrial offering: It is not a moneymaker.  For this reason, he concluded that a combination of free-to-air and dedicated premium mobile TV seems to make the most sense — a sentiment echoed by many industry players, including carriers.