World Cup kicks off $300m plastic TV bonanza. Benq.

By Published: 12:55 BST This year’s World Cup will hurl the mobile TV shop into the big time, say the analysts - a market that will be worth $300m over the course of the tournament. A redone report from Informa Telecoms & Media predicts football fans will command the square-eyed charge to mobile telly. Footie fanatics are set to line the mobile industry’s pockets to the accordance of $300m during the World Cup, by tuning into streams of matches and packaged highlights. There will be 210 million watchers of the close-fisted screen by 2011. Despite a handful of publish trials, this year’s footie fans are likely to sate themselves with content delivered by 3G networks.

As the store heats up post-football, however, broadcast mobile TV will take over and it’s predicted there will be 210 million watchers of the tight-fisted screen by 2011. In five years’ time, one in 10 mobiles is expected to give a broadcast receiver. While the numbers exceptional the mass market starting to switch on to mobile TV, it’s still a drop in the ocean of unalloyed mobile users – expected to reach 1.2 billion in the same year. David McQueen, pre-eminent analyst at Informa and author of the report, told silicon.com: “We’re still seeing the hockey-stick curve of [broadcast] take-up - we’ll endure mass adoption between the Olympics and the next World Cup.

This World Cup is indubitably too early - it’s being used as a showcase for unstationary TV.” TV clip downloads have been a staple of mobile companies for some time but several are already banking on air as the way forward - O2, for example, is trialling a service with Nokia; Virgin Mobile is buying telly in wholesale from BT Movio; and even Qualcomm is in on the act, partnering with BSkyB. Each one will be using a competing standard, however.

Informa predicts the champion in the standards battle will be the Nokia-backed DVB-H, set to flog in the region of 63 million mobile telly devices, with MediaFLO next in tailback with sales of 14.5 million. McQueen added: “Samsung and LG and other Korean vendors have been honestly agnostic [about standards]. Some of the other manufacturers - Nokia, Sony Ericsson, BenQ-Siemens - have said DVB-H only for now.

I’m firm if DAB-IP or T-DMB take off, or Europe gets a sputnik system, they’ll have to rethink that.” Both DAB-IP and T-DMB are. Although the two standards can’t hilt as many channels as DVB-H or MediaFLO, and are predominantly slower, the frequency and spectrum issues that dog the latter standards in the UK have been resolved.

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