Two Mobile TV stories: advertising from 3, and Telecom launches free service

Mobile TV seems to be like buses - there’s nothing new for ages and then a bunch of good stories come along at once. Today we’ve gotten two interesting announcements. New Zealands Telecom is launching a mobile TV service for free (initially), while 3 has gotten together with 4th Screen, Mobix and FremantleMedia to launch pre-roll mobile TV ads on the 3 mobile portal.

Mobile TV advertising on 3:

This is a pretty well thought out service. All the parties involved are well versed in mobile advertising, and realise that you need to provide both value for money to advertisers and free mobile videos to users - while not pissing your viewers off so much that they stop watching. So here’s how the service works:

- It’s only being used on the X Factor mobile TV highlights being shown on the 3 portal.
- The advertising service is “opt-in”. Well, not really. What they mean is that if you want to watch X Factor on mobile, you have to provide your age and gender and you have to agree to watch the advertising. So when they say it’s “opt-in“, they really mean that they give you fair warning beforehand that you’re going to be seeing some ads soon. And since you’ve provided age and gender, they use that to target ads at you.
- The ads are pre-roll, and are limited to a maximum length of 30 seconds.
- Advertisers get the 30 second video, as well as an accompanying banner ad on the mobile site. It’s a pay-per-view service for the advertisers, but they only pay if the ad is watched 90% of the way through. So someone who cuts out half way through the video doesn’t count towards their daily inventory.

Telecom TV service:

The TV service from Telecom will be offering viewers full shows from a selection of New Zealand channels. The shows are all split up into “snackable” chunks, so that viewers can quickly load a chunk of the show instead of waiting for the whole thing to come down. It’s available to anyone who is on the XT Network, which is Telecoms 3G mobile service. Now, the service will be completely free initially - none of the videos streamed will count towards your monthly data charges. But when November comes - ah! - then you’ll have to pay. Unfortunately, Telecom is remaining completely tight-lipped about the price. It says all will be revealed closer to the time. I’m sure a lot of people will be interested in a completely free mobile TV service, but when the price finally drops it would want to be competitive with Vodafone. The operators New Zealand mobile TV service offers unlimited viewing for a little over USD 1.50 a week.

What we think?

Mobile TV has never, ever lived up to it’s initial promise. But it had the misfortune of being one of the first things that people latched onto as a great application of mobile technology. So it has been suffering all of the ham-fisted attempts by operators to get people onto the mobile Web. Mobile TV has had to contend with vicious data prices, slow download rates, poor site design for mobile Internet sites, and handsets that weren’t up to the challenge. But as these problems begin to get ironed out, mobile TV will become a more viable service. I think both of the above stories show mobile operators who are a bit wiser to what it will actually take to make mobile TV work.