No surprise here: Japan and South Korea lead mobile TV adoption
By Dusan Belic on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 4:25 AM PST In Mobile TV, Research
Mobile TV may be set for boom, but so far we haven’t seen it adopted by that many customers. As expected, it’s Asia-Pacific region which leads the pack adopting new technologies the minute they’ve released.
According to a new report from the analyst firm Berg Insight, there were about 38 million mobile TV viewers in Japan and South Korea in mid-2007. Or to put it in perspective, these two countries account for almost 78% of the total mobile TV audience! These markets are several years ahead of Europe and North America where the development in most cases has been very slow, according to Berg Insight.
The way I see it, in order for mobile TV to take of, we should get some serious incentive to watch it. The strategy of (earlier) two satellite radio providers seems compelling. They’ve invested tons of money into content production, bringing such stars as Howard Stern and Opera Winfrey to entertain the crowd. Can mobile TV stations do the same thing? What do you think?
I’m not sure that they have all those many viewers. Last I heard, signal quality was poor, with signal-breaks in trains etc (ref. Wiki). Anyone heard of actual watchers?
Maybe they’re referring to the number of handsets sold, and then assuming they’re using it.
Or perhaps,the service providers bundled up mobile tv to the mobile phone services for free (as a promo) and now they can tom-tom that they have gazillion viewers!
Seesh!!