446m Mobile Phones TV User By 2011? We Consider

446m Mobile Phones TV User By 2011? We Examine Will you be one of the near-half billion (446m to be exact) people that IMS Research estimate will be watching TV on their cellular handsets around the globe by 2011?

Their latest research project a 50% year-on-year growth all of the way until 2010.

In a frankly over-optomistic tone, one of the report’s authors, Stephen Froehlich exclaimed, “Given the right conditions, mobile TV has the potential to spread from one customer to the next like few technologies before it.” We assume he either lives in the US, where text messaging didn’t grow at the speed it did in Europe, or he’s got a short memory. SMS was the ultimate viral application on mobile.

There’s been a lot of buzz about DVB-H, built up by a combination of the TV and mobile phone companies. It’s not far off the truth that the content industry are obsessed with video content on mobile phones.

Our take - All of these estimates are a pipe-dream if the mobile operators think that their subscribers are going to pay to watch TV, at the data rates that are charged by many companies, certainly those in the UK. People’s mobile bills are pretty huge already and they have a lot of other things to be spending their money on.

446m Mobile Phones TV User By 2011? We Examine

The other obvious change that this research appears to not fully recognise - WiFi VoIP handsets becoming more dominant providing not only free mobile phone calls, but a free way of loading content on to them too - WiFi.

IMS Research