MoCoBe Study of One-Seg Usage in Japan Shows Opportunities and Risks of Mobile TV

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

Guidelines for the Future Success of Mobile TV

Tokyo — According to “The Mobile TV Insight Report” released today by the Mobile Consumer Lab at the International University of Japan, current Mobile TV services run the significant risk of achieving unprofitable financial returns, and may fail to attract widespread usage amongst mobile phone subscribers. In fact, the results outlined in this report show that Japan’s One-Seg users appear to be lowering their usage of the most profitable mobile phone services including Voice and Email, which suggests that troubles could lie ahead for the Mobile TV industry.

According to the author of this report, Prof. Philip Sugai, Director of the Mobile Consumer Lab at the International University of Japan, “Business leaders across the Mobile TV value-chain must seriously reconsider their approach to delivering television content via the mobile platform, as Japan’s current One-Seg users are clearly behaving in ways that could threaten the long term profitability of Mobile TV services.”

But the news isn’t all bad. In fact, a number of exciting opportunities await those businesses who begin to depart from the traditional television broadcast model, and embrace the powerful capabilities of the mobile platform.

“Television content delivered through the mobile channel must be considered the ‘glue’ to pull together other advanced data service offerings including Games, Music, Commerce, LBS and SNS,” stated Prof. Sugai. “And doing so within a clearly focused strategy around ‘Entertainment’ rather than launching Mobile TV as just another ‘cool technology’ may create true competitive advantage for those Operators, Broadcasters, content creators, Advertisers and Media Agencies who commit to such an approach.’

Prof. Sugai will present a portion of these findings at today’s Red Herring Japan 2007 Conference held in Kyoto, Japan, July 23rd. A free report summary is available on the Mobile Consumer Lab’s website www.MoCoBe.com , and the full 84-page report is available for sale through the Lab’s partner site Infinita at www.infinita.co.jp/research .

For additional information, Japanese and English inquiries can be sent to Professor Sugai at +81-(0)25-779-1400 or by email at: philip@iuj.ac.jp