At the 3GSM conference last week, LG Telecom showed a line of mobile phones that not only receive TV, but incorporate personal video recorders — TIVO functions in the phone! The handsets I played with were for the Korean market where satellite-based digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) has begun. The SB 130 is typical. It has a QVGA screen (320 x 256) and PVR functionality with an hour of video storage. I expected this functionality in due course, but I must have lost track of disk drive evolution as, frankly, I was thinking 2008 or 2009.
Savvy commentators have long realized broadcast TV (20th century streaming) and video-on-demand are heading for the dust bin. The continued growth of P2P file sharing, iPod and TIVO has made this apparent to a wider audience, i.e. with high capacity storage at the edges, you download prepared content (music, movies, TV shows, etc.) and then decide when and how you listen or view. As Andrew Odlyzko put it (in 2001):
The Internet is likely to have a much larger impact on TV than TV will have on Internet backbones. There is vastly more storage than transmission capacity and this is likely to continue. Together with the requirements of mobility and the need to satisfy human desires for convenience and instant gratification, this is likely to induce a migration towards a store-and-reply model, away from the current real-time streaming model of the broadcast world.
And note, download is especially useful for mobiles traveling through areas of spotty coverage. Yet today, mobile operators are launching broadcast TV, for example MobiTV. Established industries resist change. But what P2P and iPod are doing to the music industry will happen to the movie industry and the TV industry. The investors in today’s mobile TV had better get their returns ASAP. It can’t last. Download is the better approach.
Yes, there is a place for streaming, but it’s in live content, like conversations, push-to-talk and push-to-see (P2P video) – NOT broadcast TV warmed over for mobiles.
Of course disruption takes a while — established industries fight back as long as possible. So investors in mobile TV have a few years to recoup their investment, but the end game should be apparent to all.
Comments