A new estimate from market research firm Datamonitor is forecasting that Europe will have 42.7 million mobile broadcast TV subscribers in 2012, making it the second largest subscriber base in the world after Asia.
A new Datamonitor report, “Opportunities in the mobile broadcast TV market, 2006-2012,” finds that mobile broadcast television has the opportunity to combine two popular consumer technologies — namely TV and mobile telephone, but a number of competing bearer technologies, including MediaFLO, DMB, DAB-IP and DVB-H, have made the direction of the market unclear.
Each of the bearer formats has significant players backing its adoption looking to generate revenue from the success, according to Datamonitor. To homogenize the market, the EC is tackling fragmentation by promoting a common European strategy in the form of Nokia’s DVB-H to enable consumers and the industry to reap the full benefits of economies of scale.
While DVB-H bearer technology provides an attractive open standard akin to the current European terrestrial TV infrastructure, the EC move potentially comes as a blow to an industry-led competitive marketplace. MediaFlo, DMB and DAB-IP have all been trialed throughout Europe and the market was expected to harmonize through technological innovation and chipset interoperability sometime in the near term.
For more information, visit www.datamonitor.com.
