Can mobile TV become a ‘must have’ in a country like Iraq?

Posted by Guillermo Escofet Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

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As operators and vendors bring out handsets featuring the latest applications dreamed up by technologists in their labs, the questions “nice to have, but would I want to pay for it?” and “what the hell for?” often spring to mind.

One mobile application whose use case has few people convinced is mobile TV. If you have a flat-screen, high-definition TV at home that already soaks up far too much of your time, do you really want to be squinting at TV pictures flickering on a small phone screen? Some people might, and there are times, such as during a breaking news story or live sporting event or when you want to catch up with an episode of a TV series you’re hooked on, when most of us might, given the chance. But these are not “must have” scenarios. Mobile TV is essentially a luxury.

So it comes as a surprise that war-ravaged Iraq, where people are struggling to meet their basic needs, has become the first country in the Middle East to commercially roll out a mobile-broadcast-TV service. Why on earth would foreign businessmen spend US$30 million building a DVB-H network in such a place, you might ask.

The answer is that in Iraq, mobile TV is not some crazy luxury but an essential – at least for those Iraqis who don’t like their TV rationed to a few hours a day. That’s because the country’s power grid has not been fully rebuilt since the US invasion and its bloody aftermath, so in large swaths of the country people don’t get more than three hours of electricity a day. That means that ordinary TV sets plugged into wall sockets are dead for most of the day.

With that in mind, it’s easier to understand why the investors behind the Mobision mobile TV service, which launched this week across roughly half of the country, have identified a need to deliver TV to battery-powered devices, such as mobile phones.

They could have chosen a much easier country in which to deploy DVB-H. Iraq is not only still being convulsed by violence, presenting a constant threat to human life and equipment, but it is also one of the largest and most mountainous countries in the Middle East.

Cash-rich Qatar and the UAE – both of which have been toying with the idea of launching commercial DVB-H services – would have been far easier options. Both Arabian Gulf countries have affluent native populations with a large appetite for luxury goods and services. And, logistically, they are far less tricky than Iraq – they are at peace and are small and relatively flat.

But despite well-publicized DVB-H trials in both countries over the past couple of years, regulators have yet to issue operating licenses. And even when they are issued and services are launched, the question will remain whether the nice-to-have use case of mobile TV in these affluent societies will create enough demand for the service.

It’s of course far too early to tell how well the Mobision service will do in Iraq. One drawback with the service is that Mobision is not subsidizing the retail price of the DVB-H handsets needed for the service. The company tried to get the local cellcos onboard, but they were asking for far too big a share of revenue, so it’s gone ahead without them. With the cellcos onboard, it would have been easier to offer subsidized handsets.

What with the cost of the handset, the US$120 that users need to pay to subscribe to the service for a year, plus a US$35 service-setup fee, many people might think twice before digging their hand in their pocket to subscribe.
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One advantage of the service, though, is that it is relying on microSD cards for its conditional access, so it can be viewed on any device with a microSD slot and a DVB-H antenna – not just DVB-H phones.

Regardless of Mobision’s chances of success, its launch in Iraq is another illustration of how mobile services can come into their own in societies where more-traditional alternatives are simply not available to large chunks of the population – starting with mobile telephony itself.

Similarly, it could be argued that where mobile TV will find its greatest market in developed countries is among the less affluent and more rootless segments of society, such as migrant workers and teenage students. The desire to watch TV on a tiny screen will be far greater for someone with no fixed abode or who has to share a TV set with people with different viewing tastes than someone already comfortably settled in a home-TV-viewing routine.

But if the lights go out, even the latter might be enticed to watch TV on phones.