I was surprised, although I shouldn’t have been, to find that AT&T had purchased a ton of 700 MHz. spectrum formally owned by Aloha Partners. Aloha won this spectrum a few years ago and had planned to roll out mobile video services based on DVB-H.
Now, I’m not a big fan of mobile TV, and that’s because I’m not a big fan of TV at all anymore. I grew up with television, but, if there’s any doubt left, it has indeed become the vast wasteland that Newton Minnow spoke of so many years ago. Most TV shows today are just trash, but slick marketing coupled with a lack of creativity on the part of all too many viewers still brings in an audience – an audience for so many commercials that I must question my own sanity in paying Comcast more than $100 a month to see ads for stuff I couldn’t care less about. And I’m supposed to be excited about do the same thing on my mobile phone? Please! For the record, I was a MobiTV customer on the Sprint Network. See anything of interest there? OK, there are a few channels that I might watch, but it’s mostly lite versions, not the real cable channels. And, of course, lots of commercials are included. Just what I need – watching commercials for products I couldn’t care less about while draining my handset battery. Marvelous!
But the real problem regardless is that broadcast television itself is dying. I spent many years working on the cable TV license here in the Town Of Ashland as a member of the Cable Advisory Committee for the Town. And I remember, back in 1992, talking about 500-channel TV services and how cool that would be. But it was also pretty clear that dividing up the potential audience like that, especially when there are so many other activities that one can engage in (and surfing the Web wasn’t even on the horizon in 1992!), means that the economics of broadcast no longer work. Cable bills would have to rise along with the number of commercials. But we’ve pushed the model as far as it can go, and now people like me are just irritated with the high prices for stuff I’m not going to watch and commercial interruptions lasting multiple minutes every 10 minutes or so. The answer is to move to a subscription, on-demand model, and that is beginning to happen. Heck, dump cable and wait for the DVD. It’s cheaper, and no commercials at all!
So, if mobile TV were such a hot opportunity, then why is Aloha selling out? It was only a couple of months ago that the company was touting upcoming trials in Las Vegas. I really doubt that AT&T will want to get into the mobile TV business, despite their current activities with some forms of mobile video, and will instead use the spectrum for broadband and voice services – exactly what licensees of the just-delayed (but only by a week) 700 MHz. spectrum auction that will begin in January will do. As I’ve noted before, the auction of additional 700 MHz. spectrum is going to be one of the most important, high-priced, and, dare I say it, exciting auctions ever. AT&T is simply jumping the gun, making sure it gets some of the goodies in advance of the availability of the next blocks of spectrum.
Are you really going to whip out your phone at a certain time to catch your favorite show? I think not. Mobile TV isn’t going to amount to much until it can support the on-demand, TIVO-driven viewer of today. And it can’t do that because licensed spectrum lacks the bandwidth and economics necessary to support a large number of viewers each doing their own thing. So, even as the subscription model takes hold, I don’t think very many of us will be watching TV shows on our handsets. And that goes double for those of us over 40, although that’s another story altogether…
