
Seems like the picture's getting clearer by the minute for paid mobile TV content, and it's a pretty bleak picture indeed. Over in Germany, DVB-H subscriptions are dying a slow, painful death (despite a healthy push by the European Union)
thanks to free DVB-T content and a lineup of compatible phones to match, and now, Toshiba is shuttering its four-year-old
Moba Ho satellite-based service thanks to the overwhelming availability and popularity of
one-seg tuners, which like DVB-T in Germany, offer programming at no charge. Technical advantages, and to a large degree, entertainment value both tend to get overlooked when you've got a free product competing against a paid product -- it's frequently a disruptive economic force that takes profit right out of the equation, and Toshiba's learning that lesson the hard way. Keep your chins up, though, guys; at least you lost this battle for an entirely different reason than you did HD DVD, right? Guess that's not helping much. Anyway, expect the service to vaporize by March of next year, with Toshiba planning to take a one-time hit of $232 million for the shutdown.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Ron @ Aug 4th 2008 5:48PM
Free is always better! Poor Tosh isn't doing so well lol...
imonit @ Aug 4th 2008 6:26PM
But as we also saw in the format war: Cheaper is not always better. Go figure.
maty @ Aug 5th 2008 4:37AM
It had nothing to do with that, fool.
Its all about corporations, not what's "better".
Poor Tosh, not their year it seems!
imonit @ Aug 5th 2008 9:01AM
Wait, business is about corporations? You sure got your money's worth from your mail-order MBA. Congrats, 'fool'.
Mr. E @ Aug 4th 2008 8:24PM
I've never really understood the push for "mobile TV", like Verizon's V-Cast. It's always seemed to me like it was a case of technological capability trying to push demand onto consumers, rather than the other way around. I've always wondered: are there really a lot of people out there clamoring to be able to watch a bunch of TV programs on their 2" phone displays? Apparently not so much.
DrXym @ Aug 5th 2008 4:22AM
3G mobile TV services are just awful. Normally they're crappy horribly compressed 3gpp streams delivered through rtsp. Aside from looking awful and experiencing dropouts, it may even mean you change channels by navigating links in a browser or through some kludgy front-end. To compound the crapness, the telcos charge a silly amount of money for the service.
Roll on DVB-H. It would be running from the same multiplexes as regular DVB-T so in theory there's no reason that people should have to pay the telcos a penny assuming there is service and they own a phone which can receive it. It might even herald a new generation of handheld devices & media players which can pick up broadcasts much like some do FM radio already.