CCID Consulting Analyzes the Mobile TV Industry in China

BEIJING — CCID Consulting, China’s leading research, consulting and IT outsourcing service provider, and the first Chinese consulting firm listed in Hong Kong (Hong Kong Stock Exchange: HK08235), recently released its article on the mobile TV industry in China.

On August 1, 2007, with the official implementation of the national DMB-TH, digital mobile TV had been a hot topic. What is the digital mobile TV? Why can it attract so much attention?

The digital mobile TV is a modern television system that can receive and play programs via the wireless transmission of digital signals and terrestrial digital receivers, allowing them to be watched on high-speed mobile applications. At present, the digital mobile TV has been implemented on railways, subways and buses, and its audience objective is a special group-mobile crowd. This is an internationally recognized emerging media that is also called the “fifth media.”

The most notable characteristic of the digital mobile TV is in keeping the signal steady and legible in its mobile environment, which are under 120 km/h. Like broadcasting, the digital mobile TV uses the wireless transmission of digital signals and terrestrial digital receivers.

The digital mobile TV makes up for traditional television’s blanks

Everyday there are several thousand people taking the subway in Beijing. What’s more, there are thousands of buses and a floating population of three million, and the number of private cars continues to increase rapidly. The annual carrying capacity of the whole of China’s trains reached 1.3 billion in 2003. So these fields are traditional television blanks, and the digital mobile TV targets those blanks.

The digital mobile TV has a large audience group and spreads quickly. It has been applied to buses, business cars, taxis, private cars, commercial buildings, and will soon cover all trains, inter-city trains, banks, hospitals and telecom offices. The audience of the digital mobile TV is a city’s, and inter-cities’, floating population.

The digital mobile TV will inaugurate a new era

Just as mobile phones have become items of necessity for many, the digital mobile TV’s emergence will produce a revolutionary effect on people’s habits of watching TV in the near future. After its integration with MP4, GPS, educational equipment and gaming devices, the digital mobile TV will become the fashion commodity that everybody needs.

Its emergence and development will need numerous types of equipment, and the home appliances industry is the largest beneficiary, especially traditional color TV manufactures. There are two hundred large and medium sized cities in China. If every city has three thousand buses, and every bus installs two digital mobile TV sets, these two hundred cities will need 1.2 million sets, and then add to that the increasing number of subways, taxis and trains. For example, GuangYuan Media has installed and opened channels in 34 tiers trains and every carriage will install four 15-inch LCD TVs. The field is a furious battlefield.

Not only the TV manufactures will benefit though, also the traditional DVD manufactures such as Shinco and Malata have taken part in producing the new products related to digital mobile TV, as well as some digital photo, GPS and MP4 manufactures who are increasingly trying to participate in the digital mobile TV industry. These new factors will promote the development of the industry, while also bringing uncertain factors to the market pattern.

The digital mobile TV industry needs incessant progress

The digital mobile TV industry has great potential; however, it cannot stay at the primary stage and its market potential needs to be explored. There is a long way to go from the theory to the practical use.

At present, the digital mobile TV industry is confronted with three problems. Firstly, there is no uniform operating procedures. Secondly, there are still technical bottlenecks, with the content of digital TV and the industry chain of equipment manufactures not forming large-scale and standardized production models, so high costs effect the threshold for digital TV and its branch-digital mobile TV. Thirdly is its content. Most content is in the form of advertisements, music and sports programs, which don’t have large amounts of information or that are time-sensitive. The content of digital mobile TV should be based on the needs of the mobile public and provide news, information and entertainment programs.