Flying in the face of reports suggesting sluggish mobile TV growth, a new report from Telegent Systems and market research firm In-Stat suggests that the days of mass market mobile TV have arrived.
It offers the suggestion that the adoption of free to air (FTA) analogue mobile TV, such as that manufactured by Telegent, will result in a worldwide mobile TV user base of 54 million consumers by the end of 2009.
The companies' white paper, ‘Analog Mobile TV: The World's Most Widely Available Option for Mobile TV", predicts 6x growth to 300 million users by 2013 and highlights common global mobile TV usage trends revealed by primary research conducted by Telegent in Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Turkey.
Encouragingly, the report revealed that more than half of FTA analogue mobile TV consumers surveyed reported watching mobile TV at least three times a week, with 20% of respondents in all regions watching daily. In some geographies, 40% or more watched daily. Approximately two-thirds of respondents reported viewing mobile TV for thirty minutes or more on the days that they watched TV, dispelling, says In-Stat, the popularly held notion that mobile TV will ultimately be a vehicle for TV snacking.
Even though news and sports were popular among mobile TV viewers, most users exopressed a wish for a mix of program types.
Because more than 85% of the world's population will continue to have access to analogue signals for the next several years or longer, In-Stat expects free-to-air analogue mobile TV to do well in countries which have not yet formulated plans for digital TV, or if they have, in countries where analogue will remain for more than five years.
In-Stat also observes that there are large numbers of consumers living in geographies where the average subscriber doesn't have the resources to pay for subscription-based mobile TV or for the data services that support over-the-top video.
Commented Telegent CEO Weijie Yun, "The success of FTA mobile TV is the result of two primary drivers: 1) content - the fact that the content that consumers view is the same broadcast as what they watch on conventional TV and 2) the universal coverage enabling consumers to watch it in almost every corner around the world."