In Switzerland You Can Already Watch 21 Television Stations on Mobile Phones. Almost Daily, Television Networks and Producers Throughout Europe Announce New Mobile Video Projects. The Mobile Phone Is The Marketer’s Dream Come True!

Many other European countries are in the midst of television mobile field trials, but the Swiss have already signed up more than 40,000 customers to its UMTS service -- a high-speed network that permits video telephony without the need to download.

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To be able to deliver outside built-up areas Swisscom uses EDGE (Enhanced Global Rates for Global Evolution) 3G technologies based on GSM which does have one drawback – the mobile phone has to be EDGE-compatible and there are not too many such models around although they are increasing.

An hour’s viewing costs 1.50 Swiss francs ($1.15) or you can watch for the whole day for four Swiss francs ($3). Even better a monthly subscription runs at 16 francs ($12.30). More than 40,000 customers have signed up.

But it is not just established television networks getting on the European mobile TV bandwagon. Endemol, the people who brought you Big Brother, says it will launch two channels in the UK with original content just for mobile watching. If it is successful there it will expand to other countries.

Peter Bazalgette, Endemol chief executive, told a seminar at last week’s MIPCOM TV festival in Cannes that he believes demand for mobile programming will be much greater than already predicted. As an example he said that 'Big Brother' mobile viewers in the UK, Australia and Italy downloaded 500,000 clips and watched more than six million streamed minutes.

Many of the world’s telecoms were represented at MIPCOM and word-of-mouth was that they bought a considerable amount of programming.

In the US, sports leagues and entertainment companies are putting highlight packages of one or two minutes together for mobile phone use, and Hollywood is just starting to provide some live-action thrillers produced just for mobile telephone, but where is the audience? Of the US mobile phone population of about 200 million, only 500,000 people now subscribe to a mobile TV service, so things are still very much in their in their infancy there.

Asia is probably the most dynamic mobile market in the world with some 790 million users and within five years it is expected to become the largest mobile phone region in the world. The Asians, particularly South Korea and Japan, were well represented at MIPCOM. In South Korea, for instance, where more than 37 million of the country’s 48 million population have a mobile phone, SK Telecom currently offers for $13 monthly a dozen TV channels and 13 music stations via DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcast) satellite technology, but there is new competition entering the market.

Telecoms, in particular, are very keen for mobile TV to be successful. They want people using their mobile phones more (In the UK Vodaphone says the average usage is about four minutes a day per customer). With fixed line voice traffic dropping off to free Internet voice services, telecoms know they have to find revenues elsewhere and entertainment and information services come top of the list.

They are heartened by Juniper Research forecasts that some 65 million mobile phone users will be subscribing to streamed or broadcast TV services by the end of 2010. Juniper also projects that 2005 global TV mobile revenues of $136 million will leap to about $7.6 billion in 2010.

It predicts that by 2010 the world’s largest mobile TV markets will be Japan (8.68 million users) and the US (7.97 million).

But other research continues to press home the point that all of these new third party services are not the highest priority for mobile phone users. What they want to be able to do best is have peer-to-peer communication, whether that be voice, photos, or video. Actually paying in large numbers for third parties to deliver video programming to the mobile phone is yet to be seen.

The best chance probably belongs to live sports and in Europe that is why so much attention is being focused by the EC on mobile phone rights to national football leagues and also for the Football World Cup in Germany next year.

A recent TNS survey of 7,000 mobile users in 15 countries found their number one wish was new features but rather to improve phone quality with the primary desire being for longer battery life. Apart from that there seems to be a divide between the US and the rest of the world. Outside the US, users wanted high-resolution picture and video capabilities and to be able to send those stills and videos via MMS. Yet in the US only 10% of users said they used their camera phones on a daily basis, 70% said they never use it all, and those who said they used MMS put the US among the world’s lowest users of this technology.

In the US it was far more important their mobile phones came equipped with Microsoft Office and 20GB of memory.

While 20GB phones are still a gleam in some engineer’s eye, Samsung is experimenting in its own South Korean market with telephones that have hard disk drives. It put one on sale in December, and has now launched a second with a 3GB hard drive, twice the storage of the first one. It’s enough to carry several hours of video or several hundred audio files. In South Korea it costs about $700 and Samsung says it is preparing a similar model for the European market. No word on such for the US market.

There is one disturbing sign coming from South Korea. Mobile phones may be very popular as are their various features, but paying the phone bill is not. About 8% of mobile users are at least two months delinquent. The government says there are local economic reasons for that, but for those who do not have an expense account it seems one thing to want all of these new services but quite another being able to afford them.