There are starting to be some figures coming out that support the idea that mobile TV will be a big money-spinner in the future—although admittedly the figures tend to be few and interspersed between other figures that show that mobile TV still has a long way to go.  3 Italia claims that its DVB-H services boosts its ARPU by 60 percent, with a third of that coming from the DVB-H service and the other two-thirds coming from extra voice and data services, reports Business Intelligence Middle East. At the end of 2007 10 percent of 3 Italia’s 8 million customers used the mobile TV service, and in a saturated market it may be easier to increase the proportion of people using the mobile TV service than to attract new customers.

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At the same Mobile TV World Summit Miguel Blockstrand, Senior Product Manager Mobile TV, End to end Network Solutions, Ericsson’s Business Unit Network, said that the manufacturer expects 30 percent of mobile phone users to be accessing mobile TV within the next 2 years—which sounds a bit ambitious to my ears. “The next generation will turn the concept of TV on its head,” said Blockstrand. “They will use all kinds of devices in different ways. The goal for operators is to help them in having this smart connectivity.”

That transcoding is tagged as the biggest issue for TV content providers. “The challenge for content providers will be to reach consumers who want to watch videos on mobile telephones, computers, MP3 players, and other devices and do it over all sorts of networks. That’s going to require videos to be transcoded into some 30 existing formats (various audio and video codecs, file formats, screen resolutions and bit rates) so everybody everywhere can watch whatever they want, wherever they want to watch it…Here’s the problem for just one Internet TV player: YouTube transcodes 65,000 videos a day. Now YouTube is putting all of its existing videos on the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iPhone and Apple TV in a secondary format called H.264. This doubles YouTube’s transcoding needs each day.”

UPDATE: The LA Times also has an upbeat piece on mobile video, writing that “sales of video subscription services jumped to $308 million in the last quarter of 2007 from $112 million a year earlier, according to Nielsen Mobile”. Charles Golvin of Forrester Research reckons about 7 percent of the US customer base are video subscribers—although apparently most mobile video consumers don’t pay extra to watch.