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Story URL: http://networks.silicon.com/mobile/0,39024665,39159365,00.htm

World Cup kicks off $300m mobile TV bonanza
'They think it's all over 3G... It is now!'

By Jo Best

Published: Wednesday 07 June 2006

This year's World Cup will send the mobile TV market into the big time, say the analysts - a market that will be worth $300m over the course of the tournament.

A new report from Informa Telecoms & Media predicts football fans will lead the square-eyed charge to mobile telly. Footie fanatics are set to line the mobile industry's pockets to the tune of $300m during the World Cup, by tuning into streams of matches and packaged highlights.

Despite a handful of broadcast trials, this year's footie fans are likely to sate themselves with content delivered by 3G networks. As the market heats up post-football, however, broadcast mobile TV will take over and it's predicted there will be 210 million watchers of the small screen by 2011.

In five years' time, one in 10 mobiles is expected to carry a broadcast receiver. While the numbers signal the mass market starting to switch on to mobile TV, it's still a drop in the ocean of total mobile users – expected to reach 1.2 billion in the same year.

David McQueen, principal analyst at Informa and author of the report, told silicon.com: "We're still seeing the hockey-stick curve of [broadcast] take-up - we'll see mass adoption between the Olympics and the next World Cup. This World Cup is probably too early - it's being used as a showcase for mobile TV."

TV clip downloads have been a staple of mobile companies for some time but several are already banking on broadcast as the way forward - O2, for example, is trialling a service with Nokia; Virgin Mobile is buying telly in wholesale from BT Movio; and even Qualcomm is in on the act, partnering with BSkyB.

Each one will be using a competing standard, however. Informa predicts the victor in the standards war will be the Nokia-backed DVB-H, set to sell in the region of 63 million mobile telly devices, with MediaFLO next in line with sales of 14.5 million.

McQueen added: "Samsung and LG and other Korean vendors have been quite agnostic [about standards]. Some of the other manufacturers - Nokia, Sony Ericsson, BenQ-Siemens - have said DVB-H only for now. I'm sure if DAB-IP or T-DMB take off, or Europe gets a satellite system, they'll have to rethink that."

Both DAB-IP and T-DMB are currently being trialled in the UK. Although the two standards can't handle as many channels as DVB-H or MediaFLO, and are generally slower, the frequency and spectrum issues that dog the latter standards in the UK have been resolved.