Dr Richard M Marshall

I've always liked to build things. Since I outgrew Lego I've been building software, development teams and most recently companies.

I'm Founder and CTO of Rapid Mobile Media Ltd in Edinburgh, Scotland. We founded the company in February 2004. We mobilise applications, but are now focussing on Ad360 Mobile Advertising Platform.

I like to think of us as creating mobile applications that people actually use, but we go much deeper than that.

This blog, however, is much more about my observations on the last frontier, the world of mobile technology. And anything else that crosses my path.


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And another one bites the dust »

Just give up on mobile TV

The BBC, who have some of the best programming in world, managed a maximum of 600 viewers per day, with a whopping maximum 13 minutes per month of media consumption during their 12-month trial.

So now they are seeking proposals for sending their programming over 3G.

Why? Surely the fact that less than 130 viewing hours were clocked up during the trial would suggest that nobody wants to watch mobile TV and they should give up. Isn’t that what trials are for?

Data source: FierceWireless

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 1:48 pm and is filed under bbc, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Just give up on mobile TV”

  1. Kevin Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 12:56 am

    Given the lack of decent un-metered data packages, it no surprise that viewing figures were so low. Thankfully, this appears to be changing. The article I read on this suggested that T-Mobile represented the largest proportion of viewers, and this could tie directly to their clear and well-publicised web’n'walk data package. If so, it indicates people are interested in mobile video when the conditions are right.

    Still, I’ve yet to have a rewarding experience watching live-streaming video on a mobile phone. It’s blocky, stalls regularly, and the sound is barely discernable on my phone. I live around 1km from my transmitter in an area that’s sparsely populated, so I consider my ‘bandwidth’ conditions to be optimal, yet I’m still unable to get a quality streaming service on 3G.

    Therefore, I don’t believe that the technology, handsets or networks, are capable of delivering mobile TV. I’d much prefer efforts to be focused on developing decent mobile web services - learn to walk before we try to run.

  2. Richard Marshall Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 9:49 am

    The BBC service in question was the broadcast one in Oxford, so it wasn’t even subject to bandwidth considerations. I just don’t think there’s a good use case for mobile TV.

    As Jeremy says, small portable TV sets have been available for years, yet they have never sold in any volume or been in any way mainstream. Why should mobile phones be any different?

  3. Kevin Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 3:49 pm

    I think the difference is that portable TVs were dedicated to one purpose (which, in any case, they did poorly), so they weren’t worth the effort or cost.

    While I believe there’s a use-case for on-demand mobile TV (people use their iPods to watch video, after all), I don’t think current technology can make it good enough for the masses.

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