Mobile TV: 80% of young UK residents want it

Research results from YouGov have been seized by mobile TV company Telegent Systems. The survey-based research claims that 58% of UK residents claim they would use free-to-air mobile TV – and Telegent Systems claims that existing television broadcasting systems can be used to drive mobile TV to this audience.

Who are the players here?

YouGov is an internet-based market research firm set up in 2001. It conducts all research over the internet – it has a panel of 250,000 respondents in the UK, from which it completes demographically representative surveys. In the years since its founding, YouGov has set up offices in countries all over the world, and despite its name it is completely independent from any government (well… kind of. It has been accused of political bias, but this particular survey doesn’t fall into that category)

The motto of Telegent Systems is “TV on every screen”. The company builds chipsets that pick up TV for smaller devices like mobile phones, netbooks and laptops. The company supports both analogue and digital standards and refers to itself as “the company that makes television mobile”. Importantly, we’re looking at free-to-air TV here – stations which broadcast their programming to anyone who has a reciever, and don’t require any subscriptions or payments. Telegent ships chips to some big OEMs, like Samsung and ZTE, and claims to have 80 million receivers embedded world-wide.

What does the research say?

YouGov surveyed 2463 UK adults about free-to-air mobile TV, between April 12-14, 2010. Here are the results:

58% of all respondents said they would be likely to use free-to-air mobile TV in at least one of the following locations: on a train/ bus/ tube, queuing, in the home or at work/their desk.

The younger the demographic becomes, the higher the use of mobile TV is: 80% of 18-24 year olds and 76% of 25-34 year olds.

What we think?

I reckon this survey doesn’t tell you as much as Telegent claims. Of course most people will say “yes” if you ask them whether they’d use something that is free. The important part of free-to-air TV on your mobile device would be the services you built around it. I honestly can’t imagine someone being happy to spend 20 mins at a bus-stop watching random programs streaming to their mobile – especially not when they could be gaming or social networking instead. Services built around scheduling, selecting your own programme or “catch up TV” are where this kind of mobile TV could actually make a killing.