DUBLIN, Ireland--Research and Markets has announced the addition of “Asia Pacific Tunes Up For Mobile TV” to their offering.

 

This Frost & Sullivan research service titled Asia Pacific Tunes Up for Mobile TV provides insights into the progresses made in the mobile video and TV broadcast services market in Asia Pacific.

The study highlights some of the best practices in the more mature mobile markets, as well as documents the various challenges faced by most industry participants. It also provides an in-depth demand analysis of the market, and forecasts revenue growth over the period from 2008 to 2013. Within this study, Frost & Sullivan has categorized the featured countries into two broad segments, with the mobile video and TV revenues being the common identifier: mature markets (South Korea) and nascent markets (Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, The Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand).

Mobile TV is the New Buzzword in the Asia Pacific

The recent spate of trials and the commercial launches of broadcast networks in Japan and South Korea indicate that the mobile TV fever could well catch on throughout the Asia Pacific. The markets that have commercially launched their DVB-H mobile TV broadcast services are Vietnam Multimedia Corporation (VMC) in September 2006, and Smart Communications in February 2007. Mature mobile markets such as South Korea and Japan, had both commercially launched their own homegrown standards earlier. While the former had spearheaded the DMB standards (S-DMB launched in May 2005 and T-DMB in December, the same year), the latter launched ISDBT, also known as 1-seg, in April 2006. In China, T-DMB (a different version from South Korea’s) and CMMB, both homegrown standards, are being deliberated for the country’s national mobile TV broadcast standard.

However, most mobile video offerings today are still in the test stage, and operators are developing the business models to determine what content people want and their willingness to pay. "On the technical side, mobile operators are in the process of looking at delivery options and in this regard, the industry has multiple options for the introduction of services," notes the analyst of this research service. "These include dedicated multicasting networks, based on DVB-H or QUALCOMM Incorporated’s forward link only (FLO), high-speed unicast streaming over operators’ existing third-generation networks, or broadcasting and multicasting, using technologies such as multimedia broadcast and multicast standard (MBMS)."

Combination of Unicast and Broadcast Technologies likely to Gain Popularity

Quite significantly, many of the technology vendors are viewing multicast and unicast as complementary technologies. Although unicast networks may be efficient enough to meet the short-term consumer demands of mobile video services, broadcasting technology will be a necessity to bring such services to the mainstream. Having said that, solutions based on broadcast systems will not be able to support non-broadcast services, such as video on demand; hence, a combination of unicast and broadcast technologies is likely to gain popularity in the future. While broadcast will be used for the most popular programs and an unlimited number of additional programs, on-demand content will be delivered using unicast.

Going forward, the total Asia Pacific mobile video is expected to reach $1.88 billion in 2013, with growth emanating mainly from mobile TV and video streaming. "The market is expected to hit mass adoption after 2009, when issues such as handset availability, network interoperability, maturity of ecosystem, and digital rights management (DRM) issues are adequately addressed," says the analyst. "While South Korea will remain the biggest market for mobile video in Asia Pacific, outside Japan, other potential leading markets include Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand."

Companies Mentioned:

-- SK Telecom

-- ROK Corporation Ltd.

-- iVision China Inc.

-- Streamezzo Group

-- Player X Ltd.

-- Qtelmedia (M) Sdn. Bhd.

-- Nokia

-- Frontier Silicon

-- Dragon New Media

-- PDX.CN

-- Pandora TV

-- Qualcomm

-- Innoxius Technologies

-- Ericsson

For more information, visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c78802.