Recently Yours Truly has become curious as to the many burgeoning developments regarding Mobile TV, and so a quick survey was dispatched forthwith to some companies developing and working in the space, and to experts capable of commenting on this dynamic industry. The results of this survey have been appearing in this column in multiple parts.

 

This time around I spoke with industry legend Brough Turner (News - Alert), the co-founder and CTO of NMS Communications (remember when they were Natural Microsystems?), one of the greatest telecom technologists and thinkers of the past 20 years.

 

 

 

I normally think of Mobile TV as broadcasting to handsets versus Mobile Video-on-Demand which is unicast over the data path of mobile operators’ traditional networks. There is a certain amount of confusion in the market, but the biggest discussion of Mobile TV is normally about broadcasting systems and standards.

 

 

I’m not familiar with the details of negotiations within Europe. It is true that European agreement on GSM mobile technology allowed GSM to reach high volumes and thus low costs which in turn propelled GSM to global market leadership. There are many in Europe that would like to repeat this with Mobile TV.

 

Japan, Korea and the U.S. have reached other decisions. In the US it’s been a market race. Qualcomm took the lead by creating their own mobile TV operating company to act as a wholesaler to mobile operators. Their company bought spectrum, cut content deals and invested in building a MediaFLO Network. Verizon (News - Alert) and AT&T have chosen to leverage Qualcomm’s investment rather than tie up their own capital dollars on what may be niche business.

 

 

WiMAX is predominately a unicast technology like 3GSM and other 2G/3G cellular mobile systems, so it doesn’t really compete for broadcasting television to mobile handsets. WiMAX is already the leading technology for fixed wireless Internet access and its mobile version, which is just beginning to be deployed, will compete with 3G mobile standards like HSPA and EVDO.

 

Generally mobile WiMAX promises to be ahead of HSPA. The question is whether technology leadership and fixed access market leadership is enough to give WiMAX a lasting edge over the 3GSM community’s next generation technology, LTE, when it finally shows up. Today, fixed WiMAX is being widely deployed in emerging markets and those operators are expected to roll out mobile WiMAX in the near future. So we will see both WiMAX and LTE in mobile networks.

 

 

Yes! Current market research shows mobile users already spend more time on “viral viewing”. There are two reasons why this will continue or increase.

 

First, even among traditional large screen in-home TV viewers, traditional TV viewing time is being offset by time spent watching viral videos (on YouTube for example) — people like watching things their friends recommend.

 

Second, the mobile handset is a very personal device that is used for social networking, whether that means phone calls or text messages today, or emerging applications like instant messaging, MySpace and Facebook (News - Alert). Sharing between mobile handsets is on the increase.

 

 

NMS Communications sees a wealth of opportunities providing video platforms and video technologies for mobile applications. We are already leaders in platforms for interactive voice and video response (IVVR) and video telephony. Our IVVR platforms are in use for mobile video-on-demand including niche variants like dating and social networks sites (where video is particularly important!), and Video SMS messaging systems. We also provided the platform Hong Kong CSL uses for their 30 channel mobile TV service. With widespread deployment of 3G networks and ever more video-capable handsets, we foresee strong growth in mobile-centric video content, an explosion in user-created video content and numerous new applications that leverage mobile video.

 

Mobile video on demand is the largest opportunity. Broadcasting video to handsets is a niche application that is capital intensive to boot. The biggest change in conventional television in recent years has been the advent of TiVo and other digital video recorders. Consumers have demonstrated they don’t like the traditional broadcast model. They want what they want when they want it. Live TV still makes sense for live sports or really exception news coverage, but not the evening news (which most people record and watch later in the evening). Going forward, broadcasting is still a technically efficient way to deliver popular content to local video storage, but only the most popular content, not the long tail content that mobile viewers seem to favor.

 

So Verizon and AT&T (News - Alert) can be very glad Qualcomm invested their capital for mobile TV in the US. That’s capital dollars Verizon and AT&T can spend on their networks or on other parts of the video revolution.