With tariffs for mobile call charges increasingly becoming subject to regulation, the biggest opportunity for revenue generation for mobile operators and service providers comes from mobile data services. Of these, mobile TV has been loudly hailed as the biggest potential star.

Mobile TV is not a new idea, prototypes for television wrist watches have existed since the 1970s. Sony, Casio and Sega offered handheld TVs and video game players with plug-in tuners, but they didn’t capture the public’s imagination.

This time, mobile TV has a captive audience. Most people have mobile phones, and they are used as alarm clocks, for internet surfing, music downloads, cameras and dictaphones; TV on your mobile is just the next step, right? Unfortunately, not yet. While the industry has high hopes, customer interest and uptake of current offerings has been less than enthusiastic.

European operators were banking on the FIFA World Cup in Germany earlier this year to ensure a kick start to their mobile TV campaigns. Regrettably, an NOP survey, commissioned by Olista, examining consumers’ uptake of mobile data services during the tournament found that only 11 per cent of respondents were interested in mobile TV.

The survey highlighted the reasons for customer reluctance as uncertainty of: mobile TV’s confused pricing structure, the quality of service offered, and its ease of use. So how can the mobile industry finally make this potential killer application a success? The first step is for the industry to figure out what the most compelling service to offer its customers is. Mobile TV will not be a substitute for traditional television, it will be a complimentary service, not a replacement. Length of viewing sessions and usage patterns will be different.

Mobile TV will probably be used when ‘killing time’, with peak viewing times for mobile TV likely to occur during morning and evening commutes, and lunch and break periods. In terms of the duration of viewing sessions: “it’s about TV snacking, not TV dinners”, as Ovum’s Eden Zoller puts it. Depending on which industry source you choose, consumption will range from 2 to 30 minute bursts with customers looking for news, sport, music and entertainment.

If this is true, mobile operators need to give serious consideration to encouraging less-confident customers when contemplating how to ensure the success of mobile TV. It will become essential to guarantee the service is delivered without a hitch or customers will not try to use the service again. While voice calls are an essential service and customers will call up when they have adoption barriers, at present data services like mobile TV are merely nice to have, or used on impulse. This means customers are more likely to stop using it, than spend much time or effort getting it to work.

Consumers will only match the industry’s enthusiasm for mobile TV when delivery and ease of use is seen as fool proof. This is demonstrated again by the NOP survey during the World Cup, where it was found that nearly half of the mobile data customers who used a service for the first time would not use it again after finding faults in the service such as slow delivery, poor quality or even worse an undelivered service after payment. Far from building momentum around mobile data services, this research suggests the net result of the World Cup has been to generate a negative user experience among mobile subscribers.

When customers encounter difficulties using a service, they quickly give up trying, usually without notifying the operator. This is where the challenge becomes difficult, as most service providers only become aware of adoption barriers when customers make contact, and many of them choose not to bother. On top of this not only are these customers not contributing to the operators top line, they will most probably also blemish and create bad feeling for mobile TV throughout the market.

So how can the industry address this worrying trend and help their customers to advance through the three stages of user activity: Awareness, Adoption and Addiction? While the Awareness part of the AAA evolution model is generally strong with mobile TV, obstacles at the point of Adoption - when subscribers want the service - are blocking most from reaching the Addiction stage - regular active use of the service.

To ensure mobile TV is delivered trouble-free, companies need to implement a Service Adoption Management (SAM) solution, which addresses these problematic stages, improving subscribers’ experience of the service from the initial sign up through ongoing usage. SAM goes far beyond other traditional approaches to the adoption life cycle by automating the detection of behavioural exceptions.

Instead of combining services and historical analysis to investigate predefined adoption barriers SAM institutes a system for detecting, analysing and correcting whatever goes wrong, in real time and most importantly without requiring prior definition of problems. Solving adoption barriers before, or as they happen means services will be more reliable, and will also allow data service providers to adopt a more proactive customer care approach should they feel this is necessary. Operators need to make sure they deliver on their promises and create an extremely good experience for users.

This can be achieved by operators anticipating, detecting and resolving potential user adoption barriers and ensuring users enjoy a flawless first time experience every time or they can forget repeat customers. Unfortunately, many operators are still too busy with introducing new services, they neglect to pay attention and manage the adoption of the existing services and ultimately the user experience will continue to disappoint. For mobile TV to be a success it is clear operators need to understand that with more users trying and - crucially - actively using the service on a regular basis, mobile TV can finally pay its way.

BIOS, Oct 25, 06 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Video