Nerac Interview: We spoke with Nerac Analyst, Paul Mueller, about one of the hotter emerging trends in consumer electronics today: watching TV on a cell phone. Paul discusses some of the leading companies offering TV to cell phone service, consumer demands for the various offerings and some of the finer nuances facing the technology associated with providing TV to cell phone service.

Nerac: What’s the most interesting thing in Consumer Electronics to you right now, Paul?

Paul: That’s easy, watching TV on my cell phone.

Nerac: We can’t do that yet, can we?

Paul: We sure can. If you have a Palm Treo 650, you can get MobiTV for only $9.99 per month. They provide about 15 different channels you can watch.

Nerac: So you can only get TV on your cell phone if you have a Treo?

Paul: No, that was just off the top of my head. You can get MobiTV services from specific mobile phone service providers such as Sprint or Cingular if you have a compatible phone. The MobiTV web site lists all the compatible phones and service providers. And there are a few other companies planning on delivering TV to your cell phone in the near future.

Nerac: Who are they?

Paul: Well, Qualcomm has developed a technology for delivering TV to cell phones which they call MediaFLO. And Modeo is working on delivering TV content to cell phones using the DVB-H standard, which is backed by companies like Philips, Nokia and Motorola.

Nerac: Is there enough demand in this market for three companies to survive?

Paul: Definitely! MobiTV has passed the 1 million subscriber level this year. I’ve seen it predicted that his market will grow to 20-30 million users by 2010. This is plenty of room for multiple providers. But, I think once MediaFLO is released by Qualcomm it will gradually become the market leader. I say this because MobiTV is transmitted over the existing networks of the various carriers. As demand for video programming grows over the next few years, their networks will become saturated and eventually bog down. The beauty of MediaFLO is that it operates via its own network. Modeo would also build its own network specializing in video broadcasting, but Modeo would use yet another standard known as Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds (DVB-H).

Nerac: This is starting to get confusing.

Paul: I wasn’t going to mention the fact that South Korea uses another method of delivering TV to cell phones. They use satellite-to-phone technology, but this has the drawback of needing to place a lot of expensive signal repeaters throughout their cities. But I’ll stay focused on the US markets to minimize the confusion.

Nerac: Anything else you’d like to add?

Paul: The Cellular Telephone Industry Association’s annual show CTIA Wireless 2006 had live demonstrations of the Modeo product, Qualcomm’s MediaFLO product, and the MobiTV product. If you didn’t get a chance to check them out there, I would expect that they will be at all the bigger conferences and shows for the next several years. This is really interesting technology, and it also fun. You can see why this is currently at the top of my list of interests.

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