BCCI Does Mobile TV Deal For Indo-Pak Cricket Series With Etisalat, UAE
UAE based telco Etisalat has tied up with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to provide live cricket to its Mobile TV subscribers in the UAE. The service is priced at 35 Dirhams (around Rs. 375) per week, and will be available for five weeks (till December 12). Apart from that, Etisalat is also has SMS alerts, priced at 10 Dirhams per week, and alerts at 0.4 dirhams each. More details at albawaba.com.
A couple of things: it’s interesting that the BCCI has sold mobile TV rights to Etisalat; while the details of the deal are not disclosed, this is a sign of things to come…if and when India does get 3G, it’s likely that the cash-rich board will sell mobile TV rights separately. Secondly, if anyone reading this in the UAE has subscribed to the service, do tell us how it is; I’ve seen football matches on 3G, but I believe the much smaller cricket ball would be difficult to spot on that tiny screen.
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Comments (2)
Dec 10, 2007 7:04 AM
I think the report brings out some key factors in the Indian Scenario which are holding back progress on mobile TV.
Firstly we do not have 3G ( Yet). Mobile TV on GSM/GPRS is not practical.
Secondly, we do not yet have a terrestrrial broadcast policy, though TRAI has given recommendations.
Mobile Tv services are not only TV- they are multimedia and downloads, user generated content and interactive TV. The entire mobile sector can be on a higher pedestal once these are resolved.
Jan 14, 2008 4:43 AM
Need for Multifunction Phones for growth of multimedia services
One fact which seriously bothers me is that while a greater and greater number of services are becoming available over the mobile networks, the market is seriously getting segmented into phones which can perform some types of functions but not others.
Examples are many. The segmentation of market today is in the form of business phones ( a la blackberry), multimedia phones ( a la Walkman or Rockr 6), location based service capable phones, Phones which support terrestrial mobile TV( a la Nokia N72, N93),Phones which will support 3G ( a la Sony Ericsson P1i) and others which will not.
Then there is a dimension of phones which are locked to networks and will permit some actions and not others. The market will get further segmented when new phones such as iphone will be launched which will have their own mass appeal.
The question before service providers then is how to address the market? If a user has a newly bought phone, which is very advanced and so on, but does not support mobile TV then such a customer is obviously not in the covered customers category.
The most traditional way to address such an issue has been to somehow bundle the handset with the service and recover the handset amount in future subscriptions. It would be desirable in such cases that the phones offered are multifunctional for greater user acceptability, such as supporting push mail, multimedia and LBS functions.
A body such as OMA needs to take a lead in this matter for higher growth of services and critical mass of customers for service providers.
http://www.mobiletvbook.com