World Cup kicks off mobile TV

The World Cup in Germany commenced over the weekend with the opening ceremonies viewed by almost 1.5 billion people globally, making it the most viewed sporting event in the planet. Just to share some other interesting trivia, the last World Cup in 2002 produced a unique audience of over three billion people with 1.1 billion watching the finals alone. Wow, that is an amazing number that translates to half of the world’s population. It, indeed, sounds like the most ideal playing ground for any new product.

Though still in its infancy stage, mobile TV is leveraging on this opportunity to capture the imagination of the mobile consumer and become the platform to drive him to other forms of mobile entertainment. Numerous broadcast services have launched in Europe, led by 3 in Italy and Debitel in Germany using DVB-H and T-DMB networks, respectively, which it is hoped will spark a rush of further launches and impact positively on subscriber take-up. DVB-H stands for Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld and is the chosen European standard for DVB transmission used by manufacturers like Nokia. For this dominant format, IP datagrams are transmitted as data bursts in small time slots and time slicing technology has been incorporated to reduce power consumption for small handheld devices. On the other hand, the competing standard used by manufacturers like Samsung is T-DMB or Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting.

T-DMB transmission is streamed using MPEG-4 Part 10 for the video and MPEG-4 Part 3 for the audio. So far, where T-DMB is deployed like in Korea, the service is free of charge.

3G handsets may only be starting to populate the mass market, but content providers and telecom operators are utilizing the event to generate for themselves an estimated $300 million from mobile TV and video revenues alone from this one-month World Cup event. By the next World Cup, there could be hundreds of millions of fans worldwide with 3G handsets wanting to watch game highlights or even live matches. Why limit it to the World Cup? There will be a day when all major sports will be available in video form for mobile. As such, you can just imagine the obscene amounts of money mobile video rights will generate and how it could benefit the way you watch sports in the future. For now, I will do it the old-fashioned way by crashing on my couch and catching the game on the tube. In the next World Cup in 2010, I may just be watching the games from my 4G handset while I flop in the Boracay sand.

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Patrick R. Garcia is the managing director of Bidshot Wireless Services. For comments or suggestions, e-mail [email protected]