AssoDigitale: The e-Media Institute has released a report predicting the number of mobile TV users in the Asia Pacific region. In short:
2006—5.2 M
2007—11.78 M
2008—24.83 M
2009—43.99 M
2010—72.745 M
Only two countries in the region have mobile TV services at the moment, South Korea and Japan, and South Korea has enough users to make that initial 5.2 million users in 2006 plausible (I don’t know how the Japanese service is going). The other question I always have is how “mobile TV” is defined—a large number of the devices that receive DMB transmissions aren’t mobile phones and don’t connect to a mobile phone network.
“Mobile TV phone services will be available in Vietnam by the end of 2006 and, starting early in 2007, in India. Mobile TV service trials are also currently being conducted in other countries in the region, including China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore.”
These figures are also largely dependent on what China does, at least in the medium to long term. If the Chinese market goes well the figures will be a lot higher, but that depends on how well the Chinese standard works.
There will be a lot of mobile TV technologies used in the region, with the most common being: Digital Video Broadcasting—Handheld (DVB-H) standard, Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (T-DMB), Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (S-DMB). Other standards that will get a definite look-in are the Japanese Terrestrial Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB-T) standard and the Chinese Satellite and Terrestrial Interactive Multiservice Infrastructures (StiMI and TtiMi). MediaFLO also has a couple of trials going in Japan. (Press Release)