Leader: Why mobile TV is important

Why is mobile TV - in all its main guises - important? Well you may ask - this publication does, almost every week, as it doesn't on the surface sound much like an application that will help the average private or public sector user organisation do what it does more efficiently.

But there's more to the story than catching the latest episode of Neighbours on the way home from work.

To take a step back - ever so briefly - there are several main flavours of mobile TV in its broadcast form. (We're not talking about mobile TV as a stream over 3G networks, something that many of the mobile operators you know are doing already, and which is known not to scale. You can't have lots of people in close proximity watching TV over 3G.)

When it comes to broadcast mobile TV, standards such as DVB-H, MediaFLO, DAB-IP and DMB have been bandied about.

These are important for equipment vendors - people like Nokia in the case of the first example (DVB-H), Qualcomm in the place of the second (MediaFLO) - and also operators and TV broadcasters. BT supports DAB-IP and today we heard how ITV and BBC will rally around DMB - both are cut from the same cloth as the broadcast standard DAB, most commonly found on digital radio.

In short, plenty of companies are betting they can make money out of mobile TV. Put another way - it will happen. Trials, for example O2's in Oxford, suggest there is enough demand for it to fly.

The significance for the enterprise? For one thing, any readers of these pages should keep an eye on consumer tech for inspiration. Our CIO Jury panel concluded as much at the start of the year.

But also many consumers are employees. Might a mini television a grab away be too much of a distraction for many staff? We'd hope not but some bosses will keep an eye on such things.

And for all those who use mobile communications for their job, might watching mobile TV 'on your own time' eat into valuable battery life, only felt halfway through that conference call, as the boss asks you what you think?

The issues are plentiful. It'd be hoped that real applications such as training or narrowcasting corporate messages to thousands in the field (albeit for a limited number of organisations) might come to the fore.

At the very least, mobile TV is a big point of focus for some of the companies - the network providers - that have come to matter most to anyone in business and much of the public sector.

And after much 3G folly, you wouldn't want the ball to be dropped again.