Mobile TV outlook remains dim

Call it pessimism or just a healthy respect for reality. Either way, the immediate outlook remains dim for solving the tangled web of problems tripping up broadcast mobile TV.

Debates about mobile TV at last December's Telecom World 2006 in Hong Kong showed one thing clear—that the state of broadcast mobile TV remains largely unchanged.

And that state can be said to be chaotic. Frequency conflicts, competing standards, technical glitches, security issues, licensing uncertainty and experimental business models mean the "convergence" the industry talks about is not the type that will make it money anytime soon.

More diplomatically, the UMTS Forum recently acknowledged that there is "considerable confusion" in the market. In a white paper released in November, the forum clearly described all the problems, but was stumped on concrete ways to bring about rapid "harmonization" in global frequency allocation, as well as standards to spur the economies of scale that would make broadcast mobile TV workable—that is to say, cheap and profitable—anytime in the near future.