Telegent insists mobile free-to-air TV is good thing

TELEGENT, THE free-to-air TV chip supplier for mobile phones swears that allowing consumers to watch TV on their handsets for free will boost operator revenues.

Yun Weijie, CEO with Telegent, compared the situation to building an FM radio facility inside mobile phones. He cites data supplied by KDDI in Japan that showed those who listen to FM on their phones provide a 15 per cent increase in ARPU (average revenue for user).

He also argues research has shown that when consumers are watching TV for free on their phones, the frequency of viewing increase from three to five times per week compared to those who have to pay to watch.

Plus, somewhat understandably, the amount of time they spend viewing rises from ten minutes per typical session to over 30 minutes.

Weijie believes that this increased 'interaction' which the consumer has with the mobile phone leads to increased usage of other services.

For example, if consumers were watching a TV programme where participants are thrown out of a house, then they might be more likely to text in or call in a vote. They might even increase their text traffic by chatting to their friends to gauge who they are voting for.

The company claims that its mobile TV chips are now built into over 80 different handset models but the manufacturers are still mainly Asian and based from Taiwan, China or Korea.

The $10 extra it would cost to build the TV into a handset would normally translate into the consumer paying $30-$50 more for the handset.

One of the big obstacles that Telegent faces is that in Europe it is quite common for the operators to subsidise the cost of handsets. Whether the operators would be prepared to swallow that extra cost to get a first-mover advantage is debatable.

Another hurdle Telegent has to overcome is that operators are trying to decrease the number of handset suppliers they deal with, not to increase the number by sourcing mobile TV enabled handsets from new Asian suppliers.

Yun Weijie is obviously convinced that his mobile TV chips will succeed. However, the INQ would argue that European operators have had their fingers burnt with music. Most handsets are now MP3 players but the operators have yet to make fortunes out of selling music downloads. µ

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