Let it be low brow

As for the mobile TV part of the Ovum briefing mentioned below: the message there was that (surprise!) it’s still very early days. Okay, there are some more subscribers (Vodafone in the UK reports 200,000 and Orange France 336,000). But it’s still the same old story on the other crucial points: standards (too many), spectrum (not enough), handsets (too small/expensive), programming (not quite the right mix yet), money (how do you make it exactly). “Promising if not spectacular” is how Eden Zoller, a principal analyst at Ovum put it.

She did point out a very successful service being offered by mobile operator 3. Although it’s not a traditionally linear form of television, SeeMeTV, which lets subscribers upload videos and then get a cut for every time they’re downloaded by other subscribers, has had something like 4 million downloads so far. How did they do it? By going for the lowest common denominator, it seems. “Basically it’s smut,” she said. “Not much has been done with this format yet.”

IPTV: catching up versus keeping up

Went to a briefing at Ovum today about the state of IPTV and mobile TV. The IPTV part was quite interesting for providing some forecasts although the prospects seemed a little grim for telcos.

The message: The market is overcrowded for TV already; telcos don’t really know how to sell these services well enough; and it’s highly unlikely that many telcos will make their investments in IPTV back very soon. IPTV operators, being late to the game, are largely playing a me-too strategy when it comes to the services they’re offering; and everything cool and interesting they’re coming up with will probably be bettered by the cable and satellite operators looking to hold on tight to their customers.

“IPTV providers could start to differentiate, but the cable and satellite operators won’t stand still,” says Josette Bonte, vice president for content and IPTV at Ovum. “As you bring up something, so does your competition.”

And there is the question of whether telcos will be able to keep up while they play catch up. Crazy numbers of people are networking online and especially using video-based sites like YouTube and Myspace. And the traditional broadcasters and media companies like News Corp. and Google are paying crazy money to try to buy into this trend. According to Ovum, some IPTV operators have put in elements of social networking into their sites but that kind of interactivity has not yet been anyone’s main thrust. Would they do better to try to leap frog everything and look for the next new thing? What might that be?

Here's a link to the article I wrote on this for Total Telecom and Total Media.