In the latest news story about Telstra holding off on launching mobile TV (DVB-H) Justin Milne, MD of Telstra Big Pond, says that DVB-H has a long way to go.

For an advanced first world country, gee, we are slipping behind. If I was to live in Moscow I would be able to choose from 11 mobile tv channels.

You have to wonder at what motivations might be at play to hold off on deploying broadcast to mobile. Could it be that this will distract the consumers from spending big dollars to access Foxtel’s content (part owned by Telstra) or to access the over-priced sports content that the telco has invested in?

Unless there is a compelling, on-going, low cost and easy to use video entertainment service offered on phones, then most consumers are not going to engage with their phones in the way that they are in other parts of the world where these services are available.

Milne puts it down to being careful not to launch something that doesn’t work. Pity they didn’t take the same approach before launching the Next G service.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 12:20 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.