For a long time technical issues have dominated the news of mobile TV. Occasionally people talked about issues with royalties or whether short-form or long-form television worked best, but mostly the conflict ranged from different technology standards to the issue of spectrum. That’s beginning to change now as other issues are brought to the fore. Australia seems to be leading the reporting on that — mostly because the technical issues weren’t much of a problem (really only DVB-H and 3G were considered, and the government is releasing spectrum soon). The big issue is media ownership laws, and who should be allowed to run a mobile TV network. There’s currently a two-day senate hearing on whether the free-to-air networks should be allowed to bid, with newspaper company Fairfax arguing that “Australians would end up with repackaged reruns of Dancing with the Stars and Australian Idol on so-called mobile television if existing TV operators secured licences”, and there was “no scenario in which free-to-air or Foxtel would not be the highest bidder” for mobile licences”. True, Fairfax has a strong interest in getting one of the licenses and so has a vested interest in reducing the competition, but he does have a point — it would be good to get a different content provider running the networks, and there are plenty of companies other than free-to-air TV networks prepared to give Fairfax a run for its money.
It’s true that the Australian media landscape is pretty unique, but I think these issues will crop up more and more, especially in countries that have laws to prevent concentration of media ownership. The legislative issues over who can own a mobile TV network and restrictions on the content they run will arise, and content & royalty battles between players in the industry will continue to hot up. These issues have been on the backburner, either because they were being ignored while the nascent industry was nurtured or because the industry was too small to be noticed by the interested parties…and that’s changing.
On the other side of the globe the BBC has a review of two mobile TV networks there, Vodafone and Virgin. The article ends with general discussions of the type of content that is expected to be popular, such as user-generated content. “It’s a bit like YouTube, except you get paid if people watch it,” explains Tim Green, executive editor of Mobile Entertainment magazine…”So some people are making a few hundred quid a month from this. But they tend to be girls taking their tops off.”
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