Saturday, January 21, 2006|
60% of Europeans to have 3G handsets by end of 2010. 
Sixty per cent of Europeans will own a 3G mobile phone by the end of 2010, predicts a report from technology market analysis company Forrester Research. While 2004 saw the widespread emergence of commercial 3G services in Europe, 3G will not become the dominant technology for mobile phones until 2010, believes the research firm. GSM-only phones will fade out quickly within the next two years, and GPRS will dominate for the rest of the decade. |
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Mobile TV Trial in the UK Complete.  After months of anticipation, the good news is that the trial was a success. Reportedly, 83% of the trail users were satisfied with the service and 76% said that they would take it up within 12 months. According to O2, the accepted monthly price for the service is around the £8 (about $14 USD) mark. O2 said that from this point onwards it would no longer call the service "mobile TV", but "personal TV." Tag:DVB-H | Posted in: Breaking 3G News Our 3G Support Service - 3G Interim Management [Daily 3G News] 10:27:01 AM  comment
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Irish 3G Coverage Expands. 
reland's Hutchison 3G says that it now has the widest 3G coverage in Ireland. 3 now has 72% of the population, and is well ahead of schedule with its network roll-out and is set to comfortably beat the regulatory requirement of having 85% population coverage by the end of 2007 as stipulated by ComReg in its 3G mobile licence agreement. In conjunction with its partners Nokia, NEC and Siemens Mobile, 3 has undertaken one of the fastest network rollouts in European telecoms history. |
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EMail, The Energizer Bunny Of The Net. The Radicati Group forecasts that worldwide email traffic will grow from 171 billion messages per day in 2006, to 331 billion messages per day in 2009. There will be 1.4 billion mailboxes in 2006 and will grow to 2.2 billion mailboxes in 2009, growing at an average annual rate of 16%. How much of that is spam? In 2006, 58% of messages delivered per day to end users will be spam. By 2009, this percentage will fall to 50%. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? I hope so! We need Akismet for Email! Interestingly, the research firm forecasts that the global revenue for the wireless email market will increase from $439 million in 2006, to $1,502 million in 2009.
9:02:12 AM comment
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iDisney, Pixaires, and the iTunes Planet. Steve Jobs dream of being a Hollywood mogul might after all be real. The Wall Street Journal reports that Walt Disney is in serious talks to buy Pixar Animation Studios for about $6.7 billion in a stock transaction. This would make Steve Jobs the single largest stock holder in Walt Disney. Or what I have labeled, iDisney! Steve owns about 60 million Pixar shares, or roughly 50.6% of the company. The Pixar team would become Pixaires, since old terms like millionaires don’t make much sense for those who get stupendously rich for doing what they love.
I hope WD doesn’t screw Pixar’s iconic culture up too much, and leaves it alone to print money for the aging animation studio owner. I think this in the long run would be good for Apple. Steve, can sit with the content owners and finally make a convincing argument that he is on their side. As a majority shareholder in Disney, he can say he got skin in the game… etc etc etc. Perhaps, it could help Apple stop the Microsoft and its DRM plan, which for now Hollywood likes.
6:51:50 AM comment
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Mobile TV is Real.
Good morning! After waking up and finding another dozen or so articles in my aggregator about Mobile TV, I figured I would wade in with some quick thoughts. Nothing too profound, I just wanted to point out the obvious in case you’ve missed it. Almost every article I’ve read about the topic over the past few months - and especially since CES - brings up the same questions which some pundit or interviewee tries to answer: Will people adopt Mobile TV, and will it be a profitable new medium for advertisers or content creators? The answers are “no one knows” to both. Pretty obvious, huh? Seriously, it seems that every day I see conflicting new surveys and stats from mobile TV trials around the world, which are basically written with whatever slant the person writing about the topic wants to give it. “50% of Mobile TV capable handset owners watch!” or “50% of Mobile TV handset owners could care less!”. You get the idea. Everyone it seems, has their opinion about whether or not consumers will like watching video on a small portable screen. I have my opinion too, but I’m going to keep that to myself in this post. What I want to say is this: Mobile TV is a reality. Whether it’ll be a rampaging success or not, no one can say for certain, but the technology is real, the rollouts are happening right now, and it’s not going away any time soon. Think you’re hearing a lot about it now? Mobile TV is just going to get more and more prevalent over the next couple years. There’s tons of momentum in the area, even if we’ve only seen a few commercial products so far here in the U.S. Yes, the first solutions introduced during the past year or so ago were definitely less than optimal - MobiTV choppily “streamed” over GPRS using a Java client is a good example - but networks are getting faster, and handsets are getting more powerful and alternative sources like iTunes video are popping up everywhere. Verizon and Sprint both have decent mobile video experiences over their EV-DO networks right now. And soon we’ll have digital TV receivers built right into the handsets themselves capable of streaming 10-50 channels of high-quality content right to your phone, just like your cable TV. There are phones right now in Korea which do this already, *and* have PVRs built right in, so you can pause and record shows right on the handset for viewing later. Go read about it, it’s amazing stuff - Wikipedia is your friend: DVB-H, DMB, and MediaFLO . Now, to continue stating the obvious - if people end up disliking mobile TV, then the financial incentive for it will go away and the services will disappear or mutate shortly after they’re offered. In terms of a business, maybe consumers will accept commercials on their phones - which will allow cheaper subsidized programming - or maybe they’ll hate them - which will lead to more HBO-like channels instead. Maybe people will love Video Podcasts, maybe they’ll think they suck. Maybe people will like per-show purchases like iTunes, maybe they’ll demand all-you-can-eat subscriptions. Starting to get my point? No one really knows. What is known is this, there’s no turning back on this stuff. So next time you see an article saying that such and such a country is adopting mobile TV at such and such a pace or that this group thinks that about mobile TV, just realize that it matters very little right now. There’s tons and tons of companies working on solutions, tons of different ideas out there in terms of content and commercialization, and tons of different paths to the consumer. Ahh, now I feel better. :-) -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]6:27:12 AM comment
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Anyone think this threatens a % of 3G revenues?.
6:25:19 AM comment
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The system itself is extremely simple: Visual Radio runs in parallel with a traditional radio broadcast, and is transmitted to the user’s handset via GPRS. A reasonably informative and immersive service can be transmitted in about 200 kilobits per hour, but can vary enormously depending on the amount of graphics used on the service. Last update: 2/4/06; 12:55:43 PM .
