I have written before about how Mobile TV just is not a good customer proposition, and now we have the market decision in the US that Qualcomm is shutting down FLO TV that followed the much earlier UK decision, albeit 3 years later. The crux of the matter is that the mobile customer is not actually interested in TV, they are interested in short form video content and, much more importantly, audio content. This can be reasoned to be when you are a mobile customer, you are actually passing into or out of reception (a killer for live TV or even audio), and not always interested in content that requires you to watch because normally you need to be watching what is going on because you need to control where you are going to… whether you are a pedestrian, passenger or driver.
I am sure also that the bandwidth availability is also coming into play, making the place and timeshift the normality rather than purely taking live content as the old transistor radio was able to. The amount of bandwidth available in high density population areas also does not suit the broadcast model, particularly in the iPhone centric, AT&T broken mobile network that is struggling to provide the interactive access demanded by customers.
All in all, this has to be death of mobile TV, the continuing life of mobile audio through place and time shifting, and the need to focus on trying to give customers interactive access to information websites. The other point to make is the only mobile content that people desire is either free or one off costs – not the regular subscription model.
At least this is my view, what is yours?
