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Global mobile TV market given boost by free-to-air business model

Just as Mark Twain famously said, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated” on hearing that his obituary had been published prematurely, the recent claim by DiBcom that the bottom has fallen out of the mobile TV market has been met with similar disbelief by Telegent Systems, the company that has enabled mobile TV on more than 20 million handsets worldwide.

At Computex in June, Yannick Levy, CEO of DiBcom, a chipset manufacturer, predicted that the global market for mobile TV would shrink in 2009 by 20-30 percent. But, not everyone in the industry agrees with this point of view. Weijie Yun, president and CEO of Telegent Systems, counters this claim noting that the markets that have adopted free-to-air mobile TV (which is received over both analogue and digital terrestrial broadcast TV networks) have witnessed extremely rapid consumer adoption of mobile TV and expects this trend to continue.

Yun explains: “The strong uptake of free-to-air mobile TV around the world demonstrates that consumers place high value on being able to receive the same live content that they view on conventional television sets.” He continues, “In contrast, subscription-based mobile TV services delivered over standards such as the EU-backed DVB-H represent an additional cost to the consumer and require significant capital investment on the part of operators at a time when most people are looking to cut back on spending.”

“The free-to-air digital mobile TV market provides the European industry with an opportunity to flourish in the same way as it has in other markets such as Asia Pacific and Latin America, where access to free-to-air TV broadcasts via mobile devices is rapidly growing,” Yun adds.