Nick, MarketClusters CEO, was asked this morning to comment on the recent deal between Alcatel and Samsung. Below is an extract of the piece he wrote.
“The Alcatel and Samsung partnership comes at an interesting time for the mobile TV sector as the two key questions still haven’t been answered - Will consumer actually want to watch broadcast video content on their mobile? How will they consume this video, ie on-demand or live broadcasts?
The Samsung / Alcatel deal is based the availabilty of S-Band which is particularly relevant at present in the mobile-hungry Asian markets. Samsung / Alcatel are likely to see this as a strong opportunity to leverage existing satellite infrastructure and pre-empt the mobile TV market with a one-to-many broadcast approach - ie. seeding the market ahead of cell-based broadcast approaches, such as those pursued by Nokia and Qualcomm which are more capital intensive.
The Alcatel and Samsung partnership is just one step from many in this sector as it forms - the mobile TV and video market is being eagerly courted by the content companies who clearly can’t risk not being part of the game if it takes off. They are tying up with both handset vendors and network operators directly to test the market.
Similarly, underlining the momentum we expect to see over the next 5 years, today we have also seen two satellite operators, SES Global and Eutelsat, announce a USD165m JV investment to commercialise the S-Band capabilities of a satellite to be launched in 2009 - specifically aiming the JV at commercialising the mobile TV opportunity.
Our analysis shows that we will also likely see M&A activity as mobile TV-enabled handsets move towards mass penetration. The News Corp acquisition of Jamba in mid-September was in part to gain some exposure to mobile content delivery services - almost the only area in the digital media landscape that it was not present in; it's not a wild leap to assume that media conglomerates will also look at delivery infrastructure deals to help position their film and tv production assets and content licencing agreements for the mobile tv market in some shape or form.”
Recent Comments