Comm J Market Notes
#51, October 2007
One-Seg TV
Japan has led the world in advanced mobile services, so no surprise it’s ahead in mobile TV.
The One-Seg standard for digital terrestrial TV broadcasting began officially in April 2006, and already has close to 20 million users. In Japanese TV broadcasting, each channel has 13 segments. HDTV uses 12 segments, and mobile broadcasting occupies one segment, the 13th. One-Seg is based on H.264 video, AAC-SBR Audio, BML data casting, with maximum video resolution of 320x240 pixels
A Tuner is built into the standard cellphone, and a simple application launches TV viewing, switches channels, etc. The contents are regular TV channels – that same thrilling mix of celebrity talk shows, quiz shows, and late-night weirdness (remember the scene in LOST IN TRANSLATION?) – only you get to enjoy them on a 2” phone display instead of 40” HDTV. Japan never developed a strong Cable TV culture, so terrestial contents seem just fine.
Even before the cellphones could get tuner chips embedded, hundreds of thousands of people bought USB plug-in PC tuners. The “killer application” here seems to be salarymen watching the high-school baseball championships at lunchtime.
The mobile operators get no direct revenue from this service – it is an infrastructure of the cellphone, free to the user. But, operators and Content Providers will figure out lots of indirect revenue streams – EPG services, record-and-playback, layover advertising, related contents downloads, See/Click/Buy, interactive services, etc.
Japan is trying to spread the one-seg standard to overseas territories such as South America. Will it have more success than its PCS & WCDMA cellular standards, or will the Europeans win again with DVB-H mobile TV? Meanwhile, in Japan there is talk of a next-generation Four-Seg standard…