Today’s news about the mobile video market comes from... drum-roll please... the East. China, more specifically.
ABI Research today released a report predicting that 2008 will be the year when the mobile video market in China really takes off. The research firm forecasts that in 2008, there will be more than 32 million mainland Chinese users of mobile video.
ABI bases its prediction in part on the approval this year of two new handset standards by Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. The first of those, DAB, “DAB is likely to be the first phase of mobile multimedia broadcasting standards development in China,” ABI said.
Furthermore, the research firm notes, DAB “paves the way for upgrading to China's proposed mobile multimedia broadcasting standard, T-DMB, a terrestrial implementation of SK Telecom's mobile video format.”
Because adoption of DAB and T-DMB is voluntary, ABI analyst Jake Saunders predicts that media groups and TV stations will start by deploying DAB and move to T-DMB at a later date.
“The Chinese government will give preference to a standard that will be used in the 2008 Olympics, and DAB has been listed as one of the broadcast services that will be available at the Beijing Games,” Saunders noted in a statement.
A dearth of content for systems using the new standards currently is a barrier to entry, Saunders added, but noted that the problem will disappear in the next two years.
"The current content shortage is caused by the limited number of handset TV SP licenses,” Saunders said in the report. “When more companies obtain licenses, competition will become the lubricant to drive up the market.”
In the meantime, mobile operators in Hong Kong aren’t sitting around twiddling their thumbs when it comes to mobile video. One example is PCCW, which runs an IPTV business that looks ripe to boost the company’s performance in the 3G market.
Taking a more localized look at the matter (rather than at mainland China as a whole), ABI predicted that in 2008 there will be about 715,000 mobile video users in Hong Kong, and more than 1.5 million in Taiwan.
Here’s my conclusion based on all this: if you’re interested in getting a sense of the future of mobile video, keep at least one eye peeled to the East.
