Mobile TV

It's safe to say mobile television experienced serious growing pains throughout 2008. (Although to be fair, it could have been worse: No one actually aired Growing Pains on mobile TV this year.) The mobile broadcast platform showed occasional flashes of promise, tied mostly to live sporting events such as the Summer Olympics and golf's U.S. Open, but from an international perspective the medium is in serious trouble. This summer, the British Broadcasting Corporation admitted a free mobile TV trial available to subscribers of Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile and 3UK attracted less than 600 viewers per day, and launched a public consultation to consider its next move. That same week, electronics giant Toshiba announced plans to shutter its Mobile Broadcasting Corporation subsidiary in March 2009, citing anemic consumer interest. MBC's MobaHo! service launched in Japan in 2004 and attracted only around 100,000 subscribers in four years' time; Toshiba originally forecast subscriber totals in excess of a million by the end of 2007.

While more than 330 million mobile subscribers worldwide will own broadcast TV-enabled handsets by 2013, fewer than 14 percent will sign up for premium mobile TV services according to a recent forecast issued by market analysis firm Juniper Research. Despite forecasting annual worldwide end-user revenues of $2.7 billion by 2013, Juniper contends the development of handsets capable of receiving free-to-air analog and digital terrestrial TV signals will adversely impact the commercial prospects for dedicated mobile broadcast efforts.

In the meantime, the European Commission is poised to present a new document designed to galvanize mobile television adoption across the continent. In a recent interview,  EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding bemoaned operators' failure to fully capitalize on mobile broadcast opportunities like the Olympics and this summer's European Football Cup Championship. "The industry was not ready. It is as simple as that," Reding said. "I told them very clearly that the Olympic Games and the European Football Cup were an opportunity to launch this system, but they were not ready. It is an opportunity lost. Let's wait for the next one." Umm... what's the opposite of a ringing endorsement?