[3g-g]

I didn't think Mobile TV, in any format was particularly a great idea, screen's too small, it kills your battery and the selection isn't overly great either, although it has got better with Sky dipping their toes in the water.


Watching TV on a mobile phone has proved less of a turn-on for British consumers than the telecoms industry had hoped, with Virgin Mobile understood to have sold fewer than 10,000 handsets for its mobile TV service, despite a major advertising campaign.

Virgin Mobile, part of the cable group NTL, launched the UK's first broadcast TV service for mobile phones in October with a £2.5m push fronted by the former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson. But despite recently cutting the price of the one handset that can receive the service, called the Lobster phone, it has not been a hit.

The mobile phone operators have been looking to mobile TV as a new way of making money in the face of fierce competition in their core markets of voice calls and text messaging. Companies such as Vodafone, 3 and Orange have been using their existing 3G mobile networks to transmit video to individual handsets. Ultimately, however, the industry wants to broadcast a pared-down version of traditional TV through one nationwide network that any handset with the right kit can receive.

Virgin Mobile TV - or VMTV - was the first such "broadcast" service. It is backed by BT Movio, part of BT, and uses the digital radio spectrum to broadcast TV. Viewers can watch simulcasts of BBC1, ITV1, Channel 4 and E4 as well as ITN news. Customers willing to sign up for a monthly contract of £25 or more get the phone and TV for free.

Pre-pay customers, meanwhile, get TV free for the first 90 days and then must spend £5 a month to keep watching. Virgin Mobile recently dropped the price of the handset - made by the far eastern manufacturer HTC - from £199.99 to just £99 for pre-pay customers.

Industry insiders say Virgin Mobile has signed up "significantly" fewer than 10,000 customers. The operator's chief executive, Alan Gow, refused to give a figure but said mobile TV was still in its infancy and sales had been hampered by the fact there is only one handset on offer.

"Handsets are a fashion device and become unfashionable fairly rapidly and this one is approaching the end of its cycle," he said.

Virgin Mobile hopes to have a range of new mobile TV handsets later this year. It is also looking to introduce new services such as allowing people to download and store TV programmes on the device for viewing while in areas that are out of coverage - such as on the London Underground.

Rival networks, however, maintain that the problem with VMTV is its range of channels is too small. The results of Virgin Mobile's own consumer trials in London, for instance, showed triallists watched an average of 66 minutes of television a week. Its rival O2 carried out a trial of a service with 16 channels in Oxford and its users watched a weekly average of four hours of mobile TV.

The O2 trial used a different technology to Virgin Mobile called DVB-H. While there is currently no spectrum in the UK that could be used to broadcast the signal, the five UK networks - 3, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone - are looking to form a consortium to bid for part of the airwaves to be freed up by the switch-off of the analogue TV signal. Known as channel 36, this slice of spectrum could run DVB-H and be available by 2008.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1992061,00.html

[Ben]

Yeah... I mean it's great that Mobile TV is available, particularly Vodafone/Sky style where you can just grab bits over the data service when and where you want it, but the whole idea of people watching television on their mobile phones for extended periods of time is hardly going to take off in a world where everybody wants the latest 30"+ HD LCD panel with surround sound in their living room!

Using spectrum to broadcast Mobile TV would be a horrific waste in my view... but then the mobops wont exactly want it being used for competing data services so maybe they see this action as necessary.

[gorilla]

I like the concept. When I was with 3 and had a fiver a month to spend on downloads, I would often spend that on footy highlights, soccer am etc. Now on O2 I download...oh wait I can't :mad:

After I left 3 and was on the voda sim that I think you have Ben, (you know the £25/month one) I watched their TV service. Well when I say watched, if I was bored I would flick on sky sports, obviously when I was not at home ;)
The screen is too small for entertainment purposes. I can't imagine the market for such services being very big. Let's face it, how far away are we from a TV most of the time? Is anyone that desperate to catchup with their latest soap episode that they wont watch the repeat?

[3GScottishUser]

I have to agree with the above comments. The concept of mobile TV is good but the experience is less than impressive because of the screen size etc. It's great novelty value but who in their right mind would want to it and watch a show squinting at a mobile phone. Even more ridiculous is watching someting you have recorded on a phone via the Internet... why not just wait until you get home and view all the detail on a decent sized screen?

Only thing I find useful about mobile TV is keeping up with live news etc, everything else I prefer to view on a proper display.

[Hands0n]

Mostly agree with the foregoing ...... I do think that the appeal of Mobile TV has to be in the fact that it is simply ....... Mobile! That you can grab a snatch of it while at lunch or a short break in the office or out in the field.

The novelty value of watching TV on the mobile phone handset tends to disappear within the life of the battery charge, I reckon.

What is particularly bothering, for me though, is how we are being encouraged to use our Mobile Phones (nowadays called "handsets") for other purposes, given the atrocious battery power support available to these. I can visualise someone draining their handset's power to the point where it is unusable to make a call, and then needing to as a matter of some urgency or emergency!

Before there is too much more emphasis on using our Mobile's for other purposes the manufacturers need to up the game on power support for these devices. Otherwise, one day, it is likely that all this additional functionality will indeed be the cause of someone's demise!

Now, I must get back to watching Emmerdale on my Virgin Lobster handset :D if it can hold a DAB signal long enough! Oops, there it goes again!! :(

[gorilla]

I don't know if any of you listen to Digital Planet from the BBC, but they had teenagers on the show this week talking about technology. I don't remember the exact quote but one of the talked about more advanced mobiles, "you know the ones that you can access the net on". Now, I could be wrong but don't all mobiles today have at least WAP? She also went on to say that teenagers weren't interested in the more advanced features of mobiles, they just wanted the basics to be performed with ease. She compared it to the ease of use of an ipod.
Owning an ipod I can see what she means. But, my phones MP3 software is just as easy to navigate (ok no click wheel), so is this just a misconception on peoples part? I suppose the S60 OS can at times be slow and cumbersome.

[3GScottishUser]

I spend most of my working hours with 12-18 y/olds and i get a fairly good idea of what they do with mobiles.

The top priorities for them are voice and text of course. Cameras have now become important and many are using phones for short video clips and storing music. The key feature most have upgraded to lately has been Bluetooth allowing them to exchange files with their peers.

I have asked around and portals, buying muisc, videos, games etc and TV are of little interest. The youngsters know about these things but dont want to pay for them when they can get the same thing on the Internet for free. Sad but true....

As for MSN on mobiles.... I asked one MSN fanatic the other day if she knew she could get it on her mobile and she replied..."Really??? Thats stupid. How would you be able to type the messages". Hmmmmm??

[Hands0n]

LOL - I'd echo much of that too, given my penchant for pressing answers out of my younger two's friends and associates when they come round for a visit.

Kids have almost zero disposable £'s, every penny counts to them. So they aren't going to fritter it away for paid content when they can either share it among themselves or even manufacture it in the case of video. I've seen some very impressive video shorts made by a few of the mid/late-teens.

I really thought that MSN would be a turn-on for the kids but ....... it does appear that they have MSN quite well figured out in their lives. They do not [apparently] feel the need to be connected 24x7.

I think that this is going to be a huge headache for the mobile network operators and their associated organisations. How on earth to get the kids to buy stuff. It does seem to me that an article in 2006 may have been prophetic in suggesting that music and video content will have to be given away free and the money made on advertising alone! - if the youth market is to ever be gained.

The novelty of watching TV on the Lobster is rapidly wearing thin. Generally, when I have time to watch TV I tend to be not more than 30' away from one!!

[3GScottishUser]

Agreed... a lot of these technically brilliant ideas simply don't translate to useful products. Mobile TV on a phone sounds a great idea. One could even be tempted to buy a phone to get it but the reality is that the screen size is simply not suitable for watching anything more than short clips. How many folks bought one of those little Casio LCD TV's in the 90's (I did) and probably hav'nt managed to wear out a set of Duracells on it!! Mine lives in the gadget drawer next to the Gameboy, the mini FM pocket radio and my old MiniDisc player and Walkman Cassette player.... the museum of technology at 3GSU Towers!!

So at less than £90 Virgin have failed to shift 10,000 TV Lobsters.... that should tell the networks a thing or two about Mobile TV's prospects but in reality they should have learned from 3's failure to make anything from football on mobiles which they pushed hard in the early days.

The killer 3G application is still waiting to be found I suspect

[Hands0n]

Just a point of note; the Lobster from Virgin is not 3G, it uses some of the DAB (digital terrestrial radio) to get to the handset. Innovative to say the least but ..... the big problem seems to be signal strength and quality. A the moment, and until the UK goes entirely digital, these two will be poor to moderate at best, mostly at the former end of the scale!!

A good example of DAB radio - I can get Radio Kent on FM no problem, switch my radio to DAB and nothing!!! And this is for a Kent resident. So if I can't get Kent Radio on DAB (it is supposed to be there) then who on earth can? How near the transmitter mast does one have to be sitting/standing??? :confused:

I'm not entirely surprised that Virgin are having trouble shifting these (is it really 10,000 sold??) for even £99 - and I would have been utterly fed up if I'd paid the original £199 for one. It is only the £35 credit that encouraged me to "give it a go". I'm glad that I did - but the Lobster is seriously looking at a place beside the Casio TV-600D which was of a similar quality, making watching TV a chore rather than a relaxing experience.

As for the "3G killer application" - I rather fancy that history will reveal to us that there is no such thing! It will be as vacuous (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vacuous) as our incumbent Prime Minister.