Would you ever watch live telly on your mobile? You might scoff at watching TV on a small screen, but plenty of Mippers are convinced we are at the beginning of a massive new industry and the tide has definitely turned.
This is Mip's "When will mobile broadcasting take off" session, which is specifically about live TV on mobile rather than any on-demand or downloadable TV content. The session is very ably chaired by mobile consultant Graeme Ferguson, who was at Vodafone until very recently.
Harri Mannisto is director of Nokia's NSeries devices, which are the very high-end handsets more like small computers than mobile phones.
He said the mobile broadcasting is developing very fast.
Nokia is the biggest camera manufacturer and the biggest FM radio manufacturer in the world - he's clearly expecting to soon be the biggest TV manufacturer in the world.
Not many services have created business opportunities on mobile beyond messaging and imaging. But he says broadcast trials have have very successful results because it's a service that people already understand. He said a fair cost is about €7 per month, or £4.
Significantly, India's public service broadcaster has announced that it will start a commercial broadcasting service on mobile in May this year, he said.
Notably, Nokia has partnered with YouTube on a mobile version of the video-sharing site and, although that's not live broadcasting, the weight of that brand will encourage take-up. Mannisto also noted that video feeds will become increasingly significant because just as on the web, they will allow users to customise their own mobile TV package.
France: No market for free TV
"At home TV is so easy to use," said Solene Jaboulet of French mobile network SFR. "You just have an on/off button and that should be the same for mobile TV."
SFR charges €12 per month for its mobile TV service and has 140,000 subscribers on the 3G service offering 80 TV channels. Jaboulet was upbeat about the potential growth here: there are 3m 3G customers and 70% of consumers will be covered by the network by the end of the year.
The good news for TV channels is that whatever market there is one with a built in payment model. "We don't think there is a market for free mobile TV," said Jaboulet. "No TV channel has enough money to pay for this."
I think what she meant is that there is no way for users to illegally get live TV content on mobiles for free, yet. I can't see why there couldn't (and indeed why there won't) be an ad-supported mobile TV channel that is free to watch. Wouldn't that encourage more people to start using mobile TV?
BT Movio
In the UK, BT Movio is the B2B platform that operators can use to deliver TV and digital radio: Virgin Media's service is run by BT Movio - this is the service on those Lobster handsets you might have seen.
Emma Lloyd, BT Movio's managing director, told the audience that both the TV and radio services on this service are crystal clear and work seamlessly, but that wasn't my experience. The radio stations (there are 50 of them) are great, but the performance of the five TV services (BBC One, ITV1, 4, E4 and ITN) was consistently disappointing. Glitchy and "not currently available" far too often.
Apparently the service has 87% of simulcast rights but it doesn't seem that much.
What's going on in South Korea?
A lot, apparently, if mobile TV is your thing. As often happens with these conference discussion sessions, the last speaker's time was guillotined because everyone else ran over. That was particularly unfortunate as we were in serious danger of actually learning something from Hyoung Wook Kim, from mobile operator SBS.
He said that the country's two mobile TV broadcast platforms, run by seven different companies, have an amazing 4.5m subscribers between them. The first service started in December 2005 and one of those, SBS's service, is - guess what - free to users because it is supported by advertising.
The peak viewing times are at lunchtime and during the morning and evening commute: Seoul has extended the mobile network to cover its subway network and that'll be the same in London soon, as we keep being promised.
He said 32.8% of users watched between 31 minutes and 1 hour of TV, but 25.7% watched 1-2 hours. Drama was the most popular genre accounting for 25.7% of viewing: sports was 16.7% and news 16.1%.
So is this making any money. Not yet - each operator only made about $20,000 profit last year. But Mr Kim isn't worried: he predicts there will be ten million users by the end of the year: "And if we have that many users, we hope the advertising success will follow."
