Mobile TV in the US

While not the most advanced country in mobile TV offer, the USA are interesting to watch as several offers are emerging. Qualcomm released few weeks ago its plan for a national roll out of mobile TV service through its MediaFlo offering. Modeo (a Crown Castle subsidiary) also plans to roll out a national service on its own network (yet to be build), but not with the same technology. What they have in common is they are using a separate network and not a 3G or 3.5G cellular network. Behind the two proposals, alliances were formed to support the respective concept. Qualcomm is dealing with Verizon, Samsung, LG to support its Flo technology. Modeo has received the support of Intel, Texas, Motorola, Nokia and promotes the DVB-H standard. Everything looks as a future possible battle between competing standards, as we were used in the past (remember UWB, 3G…). What is certain is that demand is not yet there and could be confused in the short term by any standard fight. In addition, some technical/economic hurdles are yet to be solved: terminal batteries life time to support image display for a long time, terminal prices (currently up to $800). When the networks will be up and running, analysts see rapid growth for the mobile TV market in the U.S. Yankee Group forecasts that by 2008 the number of mobile TV subscribers in the U.S. would reach 20m and revenues about $1.5bn.