After MJ, what now for mobile TV?

Days after the news of Michael Jackson's death threatened to crack the Internet in half, fans again rallied around their screens Tuesday for the wall-to-wall, multi-platform coverage of the pop star's lavish memorial celebration, which took place at Los Angeles' Staples Center. Verizon Wireless reports that between 10 a.m. and noon PST, text message and mobile web traffic in the vicinity of Staples Center increased 86 percent over the same time period on Monday--social networking giant Facebook reported a total of 733,000 status updates during the event, translating to about 6,000 updates per minute, and Jackson-themed posts and tributes accounted for close to 5 percent of Twitter's total tweets. And mobile video delivery and ad network Transpera reports that after video views on sites with Jackson content increased 108 percent in the hours following his June 25 death, mobile viewership on sites with MJ footage surged 88 percent above the norm concurrent with the memorial.

Live mobile TV also enjoyed a spike in subscriber interest--Qualcomm's FLO TV unit notes that its Tuesday viewer totals increased over 80 percent compared to the previous day, and more than 85 percent of subscribers tuned into the service between 10:00 am and noon PST were looking in on the Jackson simulcast. FLO TV also reports that the average viewer spent in excess of 40 minutes glued to its Jackson coverage, one of its most impressive viewing days on record. Moments like Jackson's death and memorial--the former an unexpected bombshell, the latter a star-studded, must-see pop culture milestone--reaffirm what mobile TV does best, delivering subscribers the multimedia content and headline information they crave when they're away from their home televisions and desktop PCs. But now, as the news cycle inevitably turns to other subjects, mobile TV again settles back into its familiar routine as a service most consumers ignore. "Americans don't care about mobile TV" reads a Wired.com headline [1] published this week, citing the cultural divide between the U.S. and the rest of the world. "It's just not something that appeals to us," contends Tuong Nguyen, lead mobile TV analyst for research firm Gartner. "I'm from California, and everyone in California owns at least one car, and everyone drives themselves to work. So we're not watching television [during that time], as opposed to these other regions that people in the industry like to point to [as an indication that Americans will start watching mobile TV]. That's not true, unless everyone starts taking public transportation all the time."

Mobile broadcast services like FLO TV and MobiTV also face a growing challenge from a new wave of mobile video applications offering on-demand access to content. According to Reuters [2], research firm Strategy Analytics--which once anticipated mobile TV revenues of $4.5 billion in 20100--now forecasts revenues will top out at $280 million next year. "We've downgraded our forecast a fair bit to reflect the slower-than-anticipated rollout of services and limited momentum from carriers and broadcasters," says Strategy Analytics analyst Nitesh Patel. "Application and widget stores and mobile Internet access have taken priority over mobile broadcast." The headline of the Reuters article? "Apps a nail in coffin of broadcast mobile TV." Ouch. It's clear the media has already written off mobile TV--content providers haven't yet called it quits (just this week, CBS announced [3] a series of mobile efforts tied to the new season of Big Brother) and consumers have indicated they'll tune in when major news breaks. But assuming that the vast majority of subscribers who tuned in to mobile TV on Tuesday tuned back out on Wednesday, reports of the platform's imminent demise may not be so exaggerated after all. -Jason [4]