Call it the beginning of a new era, or just another iPhone app. In the infamous area of mobile tv, one of the big promises of the mobile phone that doesn’t really seems to take off, Livestation comes with the first mobile tv app for the iPhone. The UK based company runs in closed beta during the festive period and tries to gain as much learnings from a small userbase that is testing the service in the coming days. Livestation already runs a TV app for PC/MAC in beta, and now they have managed to bring the same technology to the iPhone.
Who needs DVB-H anyway?
Being one of the lucky ones to test the Livestation app first I must say I had a real ‘wow’ experience when I opened the app first. Even on a 3G connection the app offers a seamless TV watching experience. Livestation really shows that watching mobile TV through an internet stream doesn’t have to be lagged and pixely and that, with mobile connections becoming faster and faster, there’s no real sense in building expensive DVB-H chips in phones anymore. And even from people owning Nokia’s DVB-H equipped N96, all I hear is complaints about the tv connection being too slow or not even working.
Russia Today and France 24!?
However, the available channels on Livestation are not the most appealing ones. Obscure titles like Euronews, Russia Today and France 24 aren’t my favourites to watch. But I have to say that watching BBC World News, ITN and Bloomberg Television can be a quite relaxing way to gain motivation for that decisive step out of the bed every morning. And who doesn’t want to watch astronauts working on their special space projects on NASA TV?
Peter, thanks for the post.
One comment: I think the iPhone+3G+Wi-fi could change the dynamics of mobile TV.
As you rightly pointed out, mobile TV has never really taken off. I am starting to think that the reason may not be a lack of interest by people but simply that the technology was not right.
What’s different now? A small, but at the same time very significant thing: the iPhone is not a phone trying to handle TV/data but it’s an internet device which happens to also run a voice/phone app alongside the rest.
This, combined with a reasonably reliable 3G network with eat-as-much-as-you-like data packages starting to emerge (not surprisingly) and more and more wi-fi access, means that video services and video applications on the go may finally take off.
It took the big hard disk of the iPod to change the MP3 market; maybe the iPhone+3G can do the same for mobile TV.
Let’s see.
Peter, my favourite question :-)
Here’s my view after a couple of years talking to channel owners. TV channels belong to one of three categories:
1. International news/current affairs free to air
2. International premium channels (ie Discovery)
3. National channels
I’ll start from the bottom. I think that bringing national channels to people online is, at best, a waste of time. If you go down that path you can only offer the service to people in that country; in each country there are always one or two incumbent aggregators who will do it themselves (sooner or later but more likely sooner); individual channels can (and are) offering simulcast services on their websites; it’s almost impossible to get proper carriage agreements as most of the channels either don’t have sufficient rights themselves or if they do they want to maximise traffic on their sites; and last but not least, in your country you are always probably 2 minutes away from a TV set so the marginal value of having IP access is relative. In this context, if you have the technology you are probably better off licensing it to the ‘Sky’ in that country. We have never done it before but we would be happy to.
Next one up is International Premium Channels. These are easier to get but with a catch: they already have lots of agreements with every single cable operator and they trod their path very carefully in order not to upset the status quo. Their model is based on ‘subs’ – subscribers – paying, mostly indirectly, a small monthly fee for their channel. Most people think that watching Discovery on Sky is free while in reality Sky pays something to Discovery every month for each subscriber. The only way we could offer these channels on Livestation would have to be on a subscription basis. This may happen, but not very soon.
So, what are we left with? Ah, international news channels!
These channels may not be as exciting as Sky Sports but they do have some very interesting characteristics: they are very professional; they are mostly global; they own ‘most’ of the content; they are on-air 24/7; they generally have interesting content (terrorist attacks, stock markets crashing, presidents being elected, etc); in many places these channels are not available on traditional platforms;
From this point of view, they are much more suitable for a global broadcast platform on the Internet like Livestation.
We are adding international channels all the time and we are now looking at what other content categories we could embrace to build on what we have done so far. We think there are some very interesting things online that are not currently making it on-air not because of low quality but more because of the limited capacity and high costs associated with getting more channels on-air on TV/satellite.
The number of possible channels online is infinite and the cost is very small. News is not the end, just the beginning.
It sounds like you’re creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in the first place.
Interesting point Matteo, I agree with you that the all-you-can-eat packages really help. But it strikes how much people in the UK are still on pay-as-you-go (I’m from NL, where pay-as-you-go is near extinct). There is still a long way to go before even 20-25% of mobile users are on all-you-can-eat tariffs. So I would say the bigger TV channels aren’t too eager to share their content for mobile as well, I think they are still waiting for a bigger audience, a typical chicken and egg.
Can we look forward to more channels being included in Livestation? Anything you can share on that?
Thanks for the comprehensive comment Matteo! I’m learning lots here ;)
I kinda expected an answer about rights and wanting to have the audience at an own site, guess they need to come in the 2.0 spirit a bit ;)
Btw, what I didn’t mention in the post, it’s interesting to see space for an advert when the channel loads as well. Is that pre roll or only static adverts? Being a mobile marketeer, I directly thought of Livestation, the ad serving company Kiptronic, combined with a proper digital ad sales house (not mentioning any names ;) ) taking over (or better: kick starting) the world of mobile tv advertising?
We haven’t tested pre-rolls but I can’t see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to run them. If you want an off blog chat, email me directly.
Merry Xmas!