Mobile TV: the search for a holy grail that isn't

Abstract

While Mobile TV has been proposed as a killer application for telecom operators, market success has so far been limited. While UMTS and DVB-H offered insufficient quality mobile TV services and/or lack of interesting content, WiFi and LTE based smartphone apps may finally deliver the promise. In this paper, we report on a field study that has been conducted on developing and testing a mobile TV app for smartphones. The application offers not only mobile TV content, but also the ability to scroll through broadcasts seamlessly and share fragments with social peers. We collected unique log data on usage of the mobile TV app by a group of stakeholders in the media sector. We found that mobile TV is mainly used for short viewing sessions (i.e. on average three minutes), but that there are also great differences between users. In a second study, we surveyed the potential interest of the broader public in mobile TV in general. We found that users are only willing to adopt mobile TV if they are convinced that it would replace their current use of digital or internet TV.