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Too smart for their own good?


Without doubt this is the age of the smartphone and their emergence and seemingly inevitable market dominance is driving mobile TV uptake. But, asks Joe O’Halloran, is the disconnect between smartphone uptake and network development producing a new gating factor for mobile TV and video?


What more could you ask for in business? You get the exclusive franchise to launch the most eagerly awaited product in your industry and sales break all records. You then get to sell the subsequent next-generation product that does likewise and then a sister product whose rampant success more or less redefines a product niche that experts were saying was in danger of becoming moribund. Then you get your exclusive hands on the latest product which smashes even all of those records. And you’ve done all of this at a time of great economic uncertainty and diminished discretionary spending; and despite huge pressure from your


rivals in a cut-throat market. But you believe you have a problem. A big one.


In fact you are worried about taking on the latest product because its popularity, which has driven your customers to use the high value applications that it can support, is actually presenting you with business issues. You think this couldn’t happen? Just ask AT&T as it surveys what the iPhone 4 could do to its wireless infrastructure as more and more people use the device for network-crunching applications such as mobile video. It seems utterly counter- intuitive but AT&T has a point, a very high-value one at that. In what must be the best example of


be careful what you wish for, after years of convincing people to subscribe to mobile video services in order to monetise at long last 3G networks, just when masses of people can now actually do so, the network is actually not quite up to the job. But to stay ahead, the likes of AT&T need competitive differentiators such as offering the latest as greatest devices that users want to own. A problem indeed.


Handset availability This situation has been a decade in the making. In those heady, dot-com friendly days of 2000, one of the key phenomena predicted for the first decade of the new millennium was the widespread availability of 3G telecoms networks from which people could enjoy video on their mobile phones. Ludicrous to think that in those days huge amounts of money was staked in acquiring licences to turn services that could never be supported by the technology that was available at the time. And by technology let’s say specifically the handsets and network itself.


Even in 2005 when asked what could ensure success in mobile TV, Nicholas Wheeler, then ITN’s managing director of ITN’s multimedia content division Wheeler wistfully thought “if it were only in my gift to drive sales of handsets.” Wheeler has certainly got his wish these days. In a June 2010 report by


Nokia N97 smartphone september 2010


market analyst Frost & Sullivan (F&S), ‘The Race of Smartphones, What Next? Impetus in OS and Technology Innovation in Smartphones’, the smartphone market was identified as experiencing robust growth, despite the economic downturn.


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F&S found that by the end of 2008, 147.8 million smartphones were shipped in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America and expected this to grow to 442.9 million by 2014. By 2014, Asia Pacific was predicted to ship 161.9 million smartphones, with Western Europe accounting for 85.4 million devices.


Boosting appeal


F&S suggested that consumers were increasingly seeking well- designed devices with innovative features and applications and thought that mobile operators would collaborate with significant participants from the Internet community, the media and the entertainment industry to boost further the appeal of advanced handsets. Commented Frost & Sullivan Senior Industry Analyst, Saverio Romeo, “users are moving towards a complex and rich mobile experience made of communication, entertainment and productivity services. The smartphones are the right devices for this experience. Their role will increasingly become vital in the mobile communications market driving diffusion of new services and applications.” And mobile video is no doubt among the most important of these applications.


In today’s smartphone arena the biggest of guns in mobile technology are slugging it out to gain market dominance and video


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