The Mobile Media Review from US

Who Wants Their Mobile TV?

Word has it that AT&T will be launching its own version of the Qualcomm MediaFLO service in early February.

In the United States, at least, MediaFLO seems to be the dominant technology in the short term for delivering broadcast video signals in real time to compatible handsets, while the competing DVB-H standard has some traction in Europe and elsewhere. Meanwhile, a consortium of U.S. providers, including Nokia, are trying to rally around an Open Video standard that will use the digital broadcast spectrum owned by local stations throughout the country to start digital video services sometime in 2009.

All of this activity in the mobile-TV space takes place in a U.S. market where, according to M:Metrics, somewhere between 3 percent and 4 percent of users even access any kind of video on their handsets in a given month. With such modest penetration of video for mobile, it remains unclear how much demand there really is for carrying TV in your pocket.

Verizon launched its VCast Mobile TV service earlier this year with limited coverage and, since then, the company has issued few announcements regarding its market reception. This real-time broadcast to your phone offers a TV-like navigation grid that lets you drop into "Today" in the morning or "CSI" in the evening. The grid lets you pop into a channel or get a description of upcoming programming on the channel that is not yet live.

VCast Mobile TV seems to be a demo of a proof of concept, but how practical a value it is for most consumers is another question entirely. The technology, while attractive, does not really match that many use cases. First, this is a $15/month add-on or part of a $25/month data bundle that includes the video on demand (VoD) VCast Video and unlimited mobile Web and e-mail use. The price of the bundle is tolerable (the AT&T Apple iPhone data plan is $20/month), but the value may not be.