MobileMonday Global

First in CIS Mobile TV Forum Overview

The first in CIS countries international forum dedicated to mobile TV “Mobile Broadcasting. World success story and prospects of implementation in Eastern Europe and CIS” and organized by the Mobile Monday Ukraine and «ICT-Marketing» Association took place in Kiev, Ukraine, on May 29, 2007. Organizers managed to gather the representatives of quite a few companies that have already launched mobile TV services in other countries successfully. They were invited to introduce their most interesting cases of deployment of mobile broadcasting based on the standards DVB-H, DMB, MediaFlo in Western Europe, Asia and America and discuss the current situation and the prospects of digital mobile broadcasting (DVB-H, DMB, MediaFlo) implementation in the countries of Eastern Europe and CIS.

Peculiarities and trends of Mobile TV in CIS:

1. All the global deployments and trials of DVB-H are initiated by MNOs or are organized in partnership with them. SIM card is used as a security platform.
2. For mobile network operators of the CIS countries the main concern is low ARPU, therefore they are focused on its growth. Still the most widely spread model is pre-paid.
3. The MNOs have little or no influence on the handset market in CIS, so they almost do not use the opportunities of cooperation with handset manufacturers as an additional sales channel of their services.
4. Mobile TV in Russia is being driven by broadcasters aspiring to create their own services independently from operators. To avoid the influence of the operators, Russian broadcasting companies do not use the SIM cards.
   
5. Participation of new players creates new technical challenges and requires new standards to provide fair conditions for all the participants of mobile TV market.
6. At the moment new Ukrainian MNOs regard mobile TV as a perspective value added service that will help them to catalyze ARPU growth and win competitive advantages.

At the Forum leading operators, service providers and analysts from Germany, UK, Hungary, Finland, Holland, Italy, Russia, Ukraine and other countries introduced the case studies and analyzed various business models based on their hands-on experience of mobile TV pilots and commercial implementations.

During the Forum the participants discussed the most important technical issues as well as the questions of spectrum planning, standardization and regulation for digital broadcasting networks.

The analysis of current mobile TV market situation, the development trends as well as 5-year outlook for the region were presented by the leading experts of UMTS Forum, Infocommunication Union of Russia and ComNews Research analytical company.

According to the participants, the Forum provided an excellent opportunity to compare mobile TV implementations based on different standards and technologies, define the key tasks for the operators and find the solutions to the problem of lack of the spectrum.

Among the participants of the Forum there were mobile network operators (GSM and CDMA), content providers and content aggregators, technology developing companies and device manufacturers for mobile TV.

The organizers hope that such events will become regular and next year will attract attention of more companies interested in mobile broadcasting in Ukraine and worldwide.