The Rise Of Mobile TV To Half A Billion Users

ABI Research has come out with an interesting prediction — that 514 million people will subscribe to a mobile TV service by 2011, up from 6.4 million at the end of 2005. “Broadcast will be the preferred method of access to mobile video for most people,” says principal analyst Ken Hyers in the press release. “Unicast will remain part of the mix, for customers who want to access video-on-demand, but ABI Research believes that the majority of subscription services will be for broadcast content, and that unicast-only subscriptions will not be a significant part of the market.”
Meanwhile, In-Stat is predicting 102 million users of broadcast mobile TV, up from 3.4 million in 2006. It said the biggest challenge facing operators wanting to launch this service was finding spectrum.
TelecomAsia echoes this, with an article about mobile carriers finding themselves between a rock and a hard place. They can either offer mobile TV over their cellular networks, greatly reducing the number of people who can use each cell at a particular time, or they can build a dedicated mobile TV broadcast network which will cost a large heap of money and require additional spectrum.

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