Mobile TV viewers want more sports!

MobiTV is one of the biggest mobile television providers in the world. It’s mainly a technology provider – the biggest operators in the US, including AT&T, Verizon and Sprint all use MobiTV for mobile TV. Today, it has restated it’s claim that the biggest driver of mobile TV usage is live sports events.

What’s the story?

Earlier this year, MobiTV announced that a combined audience of 7 million people accessed TV services on its various platforms. So it’s got a serious audience base from which to draw metrics. And during September of this year, it announced it’s most successful week ever – a week in which it streamed over 170 hours of live footage, comprising 59 different sporting events. The NFL, Collage Football and Nascar were the main driving forces behind the week.

What’s the news?

MobiTV has released new figures for mobile TV and video usage. Unsurprisingly, it is proudly showing an increase in demand for live sports events – both on mobile devices and tablets. It is close to showing 1,400 live sports events this quarter – given it a yearly average of 130 per week.

Charlie Nooney, CEO of MobiTV says “live events are a major driver for the increased adoption of mobile content, whether to phones, tablets or other connected devices. Reliably delivering live content to mobile devices requires technical expertise, and is a true differentiator for the MobiTV Accelerated Media Platform. MobiTV AMP was designed and built to scale to the growing demand of content to consumers on the go.”

What we think?

So, MobiTV has had a pretty proven track record when it comes to sports. There’s no doubting that sports have paid off well for them, but it’s not really MobiTV that is behind that content. It’s the operators who have chosen to push sporting events over their channels, as well as the major sporting bodies that are adopting MobiTV as the way to broadcast live sports on mobile. So, yes, it has done very well from sports – but that does not necessarily mean that sports will be the biggest success story on mobile TV. Putting television content on mobile is becoming more of a reality, and it’ll be interesting to see where the market brings it.