It’s been known for a while now that although the Korean mobile TV companies have the largest numbers of users by far, getting a monetary return on that is a little more difficult. “The problem with S-DMB is there’s no killer content,” says C H Kim, Qualcomm’s (NSDQ: QCOM) director of business development in Korea. “The subscriber numbers haven’t been growing since February. Meanwhile, T-DMB is losing money, so they can’t deploy nationwide. The mobile operators say they should charge $4 for it, but the broadcasters have a different mindset, thinking of things like public service. So the problem with DMB is not the technology, it’s the business model” reports TechDigest.

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S-DMB had signed up 1.11 million subscribers paying a 20,000 Won (US$21.80) signup fee and then 11,000 Won (US$12) monthly subscriptions by January this year, but apparently hasn’t been growing much since then. T-DMB claims 3.14 million, of which 1.13 million are on mobile phones, but gives the service away free while relying on advertising to foot the bill…which it isn’t doing very well yet. C H Kim, Qualcomm’s director of business development in Korea, is still optimistic about the growth: “By the end of this year, we expect total DMB users to pass ten million, and next year probably 25 million,” he says. “Two years from now, 75 percent of all mobile users here will have it.” That’s actually the number of handsets sold—it’s estimated that about half of the people with DMB-capable handsets actually use the service.