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The government's recent green signal for FDI hike in mobile TV has once again created a buzz in this niche but special segment. Apart from agreeing to the 74% FDI in mobile TV services, the ministry has also accepted Trai's recommendation that the service provider should have freedom to choose the technology for this service.

Trai had in the month of January sent its recommendations on mobile TV to the Ministry for Information and Broadcasting. Most of which have been accepted. This acceptance will boost the mobile TV segment in India-one of the few countries having mobile TV.

However, Trai has not addressed the biggest issue, that of providing a level playing field between the broadcaster or content creator and the cellular service provider, which has been the bone of contention between them for a long time now.

Operator Vs Content Creator
India is one of the few countries having mobile TV services. Despite operators' efforts, mobile TV is yet to pick up in India.

For the success of the service, both the operator and the broadcaster have to come together. Because issues of revenue split often crop up between the cellular service provider and content provider, as the service provider tries to get away with the lion's share of the revenue.

On an average the service provider earns around 80% of the revenue of the third party content sold on their network. However, in Japan, the revenue share between the operator and the content service provider is 92:8. The 92% going to the content provider, while the operator gets only 8%.

The broadcasting industry has long been demanding a level playing field between operators and broadcasters as they asked for better and bigger role on the mobile TV platform.

Jawahar Goel, managing director of Zee's DTH service, Dish TV, says, "If telecom companies want to operate mobile TV or IPTV, they should adhere to the rules and regulations governing the broadcasting sector or the government should create a level playing field between telecom operators and broadcasters and cable companies."

However, telecom operators are shrugging off the demand for a level playing field as rubbish. Operators refuse to share equal revenue with broadcasters arguing, "content is just a small part in the entire delivery chain," they argue.

"When broadcasters/content providers talk about a level playing field on revenue split with the telecom operator, they should first understand the entire value chain of service delivery. Telecom operators provide the technology platform, billing service, customer relationship and servicing. CP delivers the content to the customer. Creation of content is one element in the ecosystem. A level playing field has to be evolved on ownership of service and delivery value chain to justify for the same on the revenue platform," says Sunzay Passari, executive vice president, telecom & VAS, Loop Mobile. Loop Mobile, earlier known as BPL Mobile, was one of the first few players in India offering mobile TV.

Content providers are also justified in asking why they should create content when there is no business viability for them. "I agree that telecom operators have invested in technology to deliver the content to the end customer, but we have also made investments in various technology and infrastructure to generate content. If telcos require better content, then they have to pay us better. There is nothing called free lunches," says Jai Maroo, director Shemaroo Entertainment.

The telecom industry however feels that the current revenue split is justified, considering that they are the ones who have invested in customer acquisition and retention and spent millions of rupees in putting up and running the network.

"These are the issues which get blown out of proportion. One has to look at what these broadcasters are paying to the actual content makers. They (content providers) have just collaborated the content on a platform. The current split of revenue is very fair. If they are really interested in equal revenue share then they should be also working with us in growing the market," says Krishna Durbha, head, VAS, Reliance Communications.

Content for Mobile TV
The satellite TV channels have to re-package to suit mobile TV services and, therefore, the issue would need to be addressed accordingly. India has already done such experiments in the past, which were partially successful. Once the industry shows signs of improvement, the content would start to flow.

Rajshri Media has tied up with Idea Cellular for its ninety mobisode series called 'Akbar-Birbal Remixed', small episodes created specially for the mobile platform. It will cost consumers on GPRS only about Rs 1.2 plus the content charges (10 paise per 10 KB) to completely download and watch an episode on the go.

"At the time that we started this, it was the first of its kind. We knew that the Indian telecom market is predominantly a voice market. Limited entertainment is available on mobile in the form of audio. Only a handful of people use data services, still we build, not to make it a global case study but to be the first to set an industry standard," says Pradeep Srivastava, chief marketing officer, Idea Cellular.

Mumbai based Shemaroo Entertainment, a bollywood production house, has made fifteen-minutes movies by editing a full length movie, for the mobile platform. The production house has experimented with Hindi movies including Chupke Chukpe, Golmal, and Shiva for the mobile platform. They have also produced a one minute cartoon movie Bal Ganesha for the mobile platform. It was relatively more successful than the fifteen minutes movies as the length was short.

"Mobile TV or any form of video on mobile is at a very early stage in India as of now. The market now is more for very small or short video clips, maybe thirty-sixty seconds. As the network supports and costs come down, it will evolve," says Maroo.

Reliance Communications, one of the early starters of mobile TV in India, in the form of small video clips of news, had broadcast three full length movies for millions of its customers on this platform. One of the movies, featuring actor Rahul Bose, Ctrl Alt Del, was made especially for the mobile TV platform. The telecom company has also made the Mahabharata available on mobile, and live cricket matches for its subscribers.

"There is a significant demand that we have seen through our various experiments. However, the ecosystem should be more favorable if the platform has to evolve. It is a viable platform, provided the pricing is right," says Durbha.

Mobile TV, Now
Recently BSNL and Apalya Technologies' mobile TV platform called mimobi.tv received a second round of venture capital funding of $3 mn from IDG Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. The company needed the funding to upgrade its product and services for deployments of 3G in India next year. A number of telecom companies currently use mobile TV services in India from Apalya Technologies, including Idea Cellular, Vodafone, Tata Indicom and Airtel.

Apalya has major tie-ups with leading channels like Colors, NDTV, Times Now, Aaj Tak, and other major regional channels along with the support of major telecom companies like Vodafone, Airtel, Aircel, Idea Cellular, etc.

Mumbai based L&T InfoTech, on the other hand, announced at the recently held ITU Telecom World 2009 at Geneva, the availability of DVB-H-based Mobile TV solution on TI OMAP3530 reference platform. L&T InfoTech has successfully demonstrated the mobile TV solution in DVB-H IPDC-based public network on TI OMAP 3530 platform.

"We provide a complete mobile TV solution to OEMs, including the DVB Tuner and the Mobile TV Software stack. Our solution is OS independent, easy to integrate with middleware components, and offers a rich set of APIs for making custom applications; enabling quick and innovative New Product Introductions (NPI)," says Isaac Sundarajan, executive vice president of product engineering services, L&T InfoTech.

The custom TI OMAP 3530 Reference board (designed by L&T InfoTech) is targeted at OEMs developing products such as Mobile TV viewer, Portable Media Players (PMP), Personal Navigation Devices (PND), Mobile Internet Devices (MID) and Portable Gaming Devices.

Taking mobile TV to a next level, Tata Teleservices (TTSL) launched Photon TV, an application that allows TataPhoton Plus subscribers to watch live television channels on their laptops while on the move, and on their personal computers at home and office.

"We have moved mobility another few giant steps along the evolutionary path, with the launch of Photon TV. This product underlines the superiority of the Photon technology, which has become the rage among Internet-users," says Anil Sardana, managing director, TTSL.

Global Scenario
Though it has never been a hit globally, but recently a lot of action has started happening on the mobile TV front, in both developed and developing countries. In November of last year the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan recognized MediaFLO technology as an official technology for mobile multimedia broadcasting. The formal acknowledgement paved the way for commercial services in Japan.

The MediaFLO platform offers a rich user experience, high channel capacity and an open services layer to support a wide range of mobile broadcast services, making it a platform to complement 3G services and the country's ISDB-T standard for free mobile TV programming.

This signifies that MediaFLO-enabled mobile TV services may be deployed in Japan once spectrum is made available in 2011.

In Malaysia Netbiscuits-the leading B2B web software platform-for the creation, operation and monetization of mobile websites, and Media Prima Berhad-the leading integrated media investment group in Malaysia-in January 2010 announced the joint realization of two new mobile web portals for TV3, Malaysia's leading free-to-air TV network, and GUA, the most popular entertainment and lifestyle portal in Malaysia.

Both portals were developed and deployed with Netbiscuits' award winning mobile publishing platform which is also the basis of 8TV Mobile, another mobile TV site launched by Media Prima last year. All mobile sites deliver rich media content to mobile devices across all carriers in Malaysia, Singapore and many other countries in the region. Users have access to the portals via UMTS as well as WiFi.

Similarly, in Brazil, ZTE Corporation, together with Vivo, one of the largest mobile operators in the country, has introduced the first 3G modem to provide mass-market mobile TV in Brazil.

Following Brazil, Argentina and Chile, other countries likely to adopt the ISDB-T standard in the coming years include Uruguay, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia and Paraguay. This is anticipated to generate one of the largest unified Mobile DTV markets worldwide, totaling around 300 mn potential viewers.

Sky has also launched a new application bringing its mobile TV service to smart phones manufactured by Nokia.

Available now to download from Nokia's Ovi store, the Sky Mobile TV app, allows certain handset owners to watch live Premier League action on their phones and also access breaking news from Sky News. The software further enables users to remotely connect to their Sky+ receiver to set recordings on the electronic programming guide.

The Nokia N97, Nokia N97 Mini, 5800 XpressMusic and 5530 handsets will be the first to support the app, but it will soon expand to the Nokia 5230 and Nokia X6.

It may be recalled that the Sky Mobile TV was launched last year on the iPhone, offering live streams of a range of channels-including the Sky Sports portfolio, ESPN, Sky News, Sky Sports News and At The Races.

Super Flops!
Today, South Korea and Japan are at the forefront of this developing sector. Mobile TV services were launched by CSL in Hong Kong in March 2006 on 3G network. BT in the United Kingdom was among the first companies outside of South Korea to launch mobile TV in September 2006, although the service was abandoned less than a year later. The same happened to MFD Mobiles Fernsehen Deutschland, that launched its DMB-based service in June 2006 in Germany, and stopped it in April 2008. Also in June 2006, mobile operator 3 in Italy (part of Hutchison Whampoa) launched its mobile TV service, but opposed to its counterpart in Germany this was based on DVB-H. Sprint started offering the service in February 2006 and was the first US carrier to do so. In the US, Verizon Wireless, and more recently AT&T, are offering the service.

South Korea terrestrial mobile TV, despite being launched in 2005, has not lived up to its promise, and while handset makers make money, broadcasters have yet to turn in a profit.

In penetration and geographic reach, mobile TV is more of a success but it has been less successful economically, in part because the dominating terrestrial TV players didn't invest enough. South Korea's government saw mobile TV as an investment. It put its research capability at the service of DMB and is now exporting the technology to countries interested in trying mobile TV-recently striking deals with Vietnam and Cambodia.

South Koreans had bought 20 mn handsets by the second quarter of 2009, double the number from the first quarter of 2008 and eleven times the number of handsets sold when mobile TV was first launched.

Without subscription fees, those numbers are the closest the country comes to counting its terrestrial users. And as the price of mobile TV technology has dropped in recent years, the feature has become more standard in cell phones, making it more difficult to gauge actual viewership.

The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) in 2008 estimated it at 1.6%. Advertisers shrugged, buying mobile airtime worth just $6.2 mn in 2008, with prime-time-commute advertising costing about twenty times less than its traditional television equivalent. Tight control by the Korea Broadcast Advertising Association, which sells TV advertising time on behalf of broadcasters, has also kept prices low.

Thirty stations will consumer-test the new standard in April 2010 after taking on the new technology for about $75,000 to $150,000 and a longer-term expense of a few hundred thousand dollars.

Online viewing, video downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing remain mobile TV's toughest competitors. In a 2009 survey by the Korea Communications Council, 70% of respondents said they watched re-runs of shows on the TV stations' websites, a field in which Hulu and TV.com are US leaders.

India could be a good market for mobile TV, as mobile phones have already outnumbered TV screens. We are a TV loving nation and full of young people, who are ready to try new thing as long as it is economical. Content is already available. Service providers are already offering mobile TV. In that circumstance governments should take initiative and come out with a regulation which should be acceptable to both parties, for the growth of mobile TV. No doubt the increasing FDI will give a new life to Mobile TV.

Akhilesh Shukla
akhileshs@cybermedia.co.in

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