Ajit Jaokar is the founder of the London based publishing and research company futuretext (
Interesting mobile video stats from the financial times .
Hello
Since my trip to South Korea, I have been following mobile video. Here are some interesting facts .. as per the financial times print edition(Dec 30) in an article by Andrew edgecliffe johnson and mark odell(Small screen dreams: mobile operators set their sights on the moving image)
I liked the starting comment in the article – ‘Mobile TV is like sex in the open air – jolly exciting idea – but not always practical’ says Dick Emery – chief executive of UKTV
Everyone is into mobile TV nowadays. One minute ‘mobisodes’ for ‘snacking content’ is the motivation behind deals between broadcasters like HBO and mobile operators like Vodafone
Having spent £40 billion 3G licenses – the operators are keen to recover their investment. But the market landscape has changed – with video broadcasting – now seen as the big driver for video.
But do people want to watch video/TV on their mobile devices?
In a survey of 1500 people aged 13-55 for olswang only 17% wanted to watch television content on the mobile phone but 44% said they would watch programs on their PC. 70% did not want to watch TV on their mobile phones at all!
Similar results were reported by strategy analytics where fewer than 20% of the people polled(in UK, Germany., Italy and France) expressed an interest in watching mobile video.
Inspite of this, the Global market for mobile video(including streaming and broadcast video) is estimated to be £1.56 bn pounds by next year and $12.2 billion by 2010
The revenue models also differ. UK operators like Orange charge a flat fee for video (£5). The operator ‘3’ charges a fee of £35 including all data services – not just video
Several continental operators like TIM in Italy and SFR in France charge a metered rates of euro 0.25 to euro 0.50 per minute
Rates of revenue share vary depending on the parties involved. In a SKY – Vodafone partnership, the broadcaster(SKY) would get 50% the operator would share the balance with the aggregator. Adult video services typically get a quarter of the revenue with the operator keeping half and the rest being shared with other parties like the aggregator
What I find most interesting is the possibility of ‘user generated’ video content. 3UK is launching a mobile community called SeeMeTV . People are charged 10p to see the clip of which the authors receive 1p if enough people(in this case 1000) download it
I believe that user generated content is the one to watch.
Image source: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/images/articles/video/FEscr(4).jpg
