If you ask MobiTV senior VP Ray DeRenzo why the company's Internet and mobile TV service continues to enjoy healthy growth even in our calamitous economy, he laughs and says, "I wish I had the answer."
But despite this claim, DeRenzo in fact has a pretty good idea of the market factors that favor mobile TV right now.
"If you look at mobile TV viewers as a percentage of the wireless population as a whole, they tend to be early adopters. They tend to be less price sensitive, and I don't think we're seeing the same types of issues wireless carriers as a whole are seeing," he said. "We haven't seen higher churn than usual."
Even more important to mobile TV's near-term prospects, mobile TV is riding a surge of favorable trends.
"The available user experience around mobile video has just gotten better," DeRenzo said. "Networks have gotten better, devices are better in terms of picture quality, programming has improved, as has the way you can watch — video on demand and live."
“And as all this is coming together, people are starting to discover mobile TV," DeRenzo said. "People just weren't aware you can watch TV on a mobile device. It's all those things happening simultaneously."
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