industry analysis
Why TV and mobile don’t mix!
2010 is being seen as the year of mobile TV yet despite all of these grounds for optimism, there is fundamentally one big problem for mobile TV in 2010: for all intents and purposes, it is dead in the water. By contrast mobile video is on a sharp growth curve, argues Thierry Fautier, Senior Director of Convergence Solutions at Harmonic.
mobile TV? The seeds of the decline were sown more or less at its inception, at the emergence of 3G telephony. History has recorded the Klondike-style rush by telecoms operators to acquire 3G licences at the end of the 1990s and in the early part of the last decade.
Once the dust had
settled and the billion-dollar licence agreements had been signed there still remained the problem: just how to offer services compelling enough for subscribers to pay extra for and therefore one’s which would go towards paying back the huge licence fees. TV seemed at first to fit the bill; broadcast TV that is.
Sadly it hasn’t quite work out like that.
Huge costs To date the mobile TV
space has been beset by standards issues that have slowed down the launch of paid-for services. There have been issues around network provisioning that have led to problems with quality of experience and, in Europe in particular, regulatory problems seem to have been designed to hinder market development. There are currently five major dedicated broadcast mobile TV standards in operation that can support paid-for services but to date none do so universally. Cost
is a key factor in establishing any business and the investment required to roll out a dedicated mobile TV network either as an overlay or extension to an existing mobile network is huge; big enough to deter everyone but those with the deepest pockets. But why should a network overlay or extension be necessary in the first place? Shouldn’t 3G and even HSPA networks be able to cope with demands for mobile TV by now?
A number of trials and indeed subsequent services have proved the concept of 3G-based mobile TV but even now there are issues regarding quality and scalability. That is to say sufficient high- bandwidth coverage is not consistent across networks even though techniques such as progressive download and adaptive streaming have improved streaming quality. Evidence also suggests that the average number of live video sessions that a typical mobile cell can support is very low indeed with some claiming this is as little as 10 per cell when taken over an entire network.
Network strains
It is by design that a technology like adaptive steaming exists on devices such as the iPhone in order to address such issues. But there’s a bigger business problem. Live programming forms typically only a small part of what is streamed over the network. Typically what is sent is not live video but instead time-shifted, pre-recorded content at lower resolutions and frame rates. Sending such content will serve to cause network bottle necks and degrade the quality of the main revenue earners for operators, namely voice and business data.
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Such non-live mobile video services really should be stored on devices and cached on demand. There are two main reasons for this: video encoding rates and delivery rates may not necessarily match, for example 400 kbps video can be delivered on a 225 kbps connection. Secondly, for most of the time when people are consuming content they might not necessarily be, or want to be, network connected, e.g. on a plane on train. Even in homes, there can be problems with guaranteeing a consistently high enough bandwidth network connection available. These are basic one-on-one network planning issues and the net result is that people just do not want to pay for services.
Transcend the traditional Operators and service providers basically still need video as part of their bouquets. The good news is that there is and always growing demand for video on mobile and other platforms. Furthermore it is possible to construct a single delivery infrastructure that supports a viable business model for
content2mobile
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