US Mobile TV: Destination Unknown

“The 12 major TV station groups that announced plans on Tuesday to form a joint venture to pursue the mobile DTV business envision a national service of at least 10 mobile channels and possibly many more.”

At last week’s NAB 2010, something called “Pearl Mobile DTV Co., LLC” was announced.  As best we can tell it appears to be a serious, if still very amorphous, studio- and station-led initiative to bring mobile television to the United States.

Today there is an obscure form of mobile TV in the US that virtually no one uses. Marketed by phone companies, Qualcomm’s Media FLO uses a slice of the old UHF television spectrum to deliver a few diluted (time-shifted) channels to hand held devices that have air interfaces to both the TV and respective 3G networks. Qualcomm acts as a programming aggregator and distributor and provides the overlay network infrastructure. Structurally, it’s a bit like the still-born phone company TV consortia of the early ‘90s like Tele-TV or Americast – big ambitions, lots of capital, negligible market traction.

Pearl Mobile might signal the beginning of something viable and different for US mobile television in two important ways: (1) putting people and assets that are actually in the television business into the mobile drivers seat, and (2) putting to rest in practice, not just in theory, the technical question as to which national standard the US mobile TV market will rely on and what spectrum will be required.

The Pearl consortium idea relies on station groups contributing spectrum they already have from digital subchannels no one watches anyway. A slice of that spectrum is allocated to mobile TV, under a standard directly related to the US digital technology which just recently replaced analog TV. Television stations themselves would distribute and broadcast programming.

In a way this model only deepens the intriguing mystery of what, if anything, mobile TV is to become in the US. In Japan, for example, mobile TV penetration has crossed 50%, so television’s net audience reach and time spent viewing have increased. The economic benefits have gone to handset manufacturers, a little bit to advertisers (higher reach, but regulatory restrictions constrain additional mobile advertising), with wireless carriers being excluded. In the US the mobile TV “answer” could simply be the same as in Japan: make the audience bigger, increase out-of-home linear TV viewing time.

But the most interesting long-term answer to US mobile TV would be a combination of bigger audience reach combined with the capabilities of always-in-hand, smart devices to organize and manage TV watching, regardless of the end device. To, in other words, turn watching television into an application, not a passive, hit-or-miss experience in a complex 400-channel multi-device world.