Strategy Analytics predicts the mobile TV broadcasting market will increase by 50 percent this year, from $200 million last year. Some big name brands, such as Ford and Microsoft, are already buying commercial spots within mobile network content.
Until recently, mobile TV wasn’t that popular in the United States. South Korea led development and now half of that country’s 45 million cellphone users watch mobile television. Japan and Hong Kong have grown fond of it as well.
In hopes the American audience will soon grow, broadcasters and technology companies have created Mobile Digital TV, a technical standard for transmitting video to portable devices. That will be tested later this month in Washington, D.C.
MobiTV, a California-based company that provides subscription-based content across 20 mobile networks, already has 7 million subscribers and has seen a 600 percent growth rate during the last three years. Flo TV, Qualcomm’s mobile TV service, is planning to expand to 100 major U.S. cities.
According to a report from Transpera, the largest mobile video ad-network in the country, more than 13 million Americans watched TV on their mobile phones during Q1. This is a 52 percent increase from the same time last year.
This means mobile TV advertising could soon start to grow. Several TV networks are hoping that will be the case, as a total of $1.5 billion in ad revenue was brought in during Q1, a decrease of about 11 percent from the $12 billion brought in during the same time last year, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising.
During the last few years, there has been a migration from the television to the Web, and now it seems to the mobile phone. CBS, ESPN, MTV and Disney have all launched programming made specifically for phones. These include live broadcasts that show the same commercials that are seen on TV and on-demand videos with ads already chosen.
An example of mobile TV’s success is the Rachel Maddow iPhone app from MSNBC. That app, which allows viewers to watch a three- to five-minute segment of the show or the whole episode on their iPhone, BlackBerry or Palm Pre, brought in $750,000 during June. Another example is the 1 million people that watched the recent Michael Jackson memorial from their phones.