After the first round of nay-saying (”People aren’t going to watch TV on a 2-inch screen!”), all the players in the cell-phone TV supply chain quickly accepted the limitations of the form and energetically began to develop programming and delivery strategies that accommodated or even capitalized on them. So, programming was going to be in small bites suitable for viewers on the go - bites such as news and sports updates, short mobile-TV versions of soap-opera episodes (mobisodes) and music videos.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer

But when a pilot study of the way 375 households in Oxford, England actually used TV-enabled cell phones was presented yesterday at the DVB World Conference in Dublin, the results shocked the audience.

Nokia’s Marcus Lundqvist told the assembled that half of the people watching TV on their cell phones were watching inside their homes, often with a full-sized set just a remote-control click away. (Nokia provided the handsets for the study.)

John Cullen of O2, the British company that managed the trial, tried to explain to the doubting Thomases in the audience. “We were shocked, too,” he said. “People in the trial valued that it was personal to them, that they had control of the TV.” Cullen said that the users’ major activities included taking the cell phone to the bathroom, watching TV in the bathtub, and listening to music in bed.

Next in popularity after the surprising in-home applications were activities more in line with what the audience expected: watching during the daily commute and during lunch.

Of the test population, 83% said they were satisfied with the service (which included the UK’s most popular TV channels), and 75% said they would pay a “reasonable” fee - understood to be about £5 per month - for mobile TV service. These last results were generally consistent with those obtained from studies in Spain and Paris.

The study provided no details on the quality service offered on these cell phones in terms of image quality, etc. But the results are certainly fascinating - consumers will use a phone to watch ordinary TV, and not necessarily in mobile situations. It seems personal TV may be a more apt description of the use model instead of mobile TV.

All of this is good news for the nascent cell-phone TV industry, and for companies like CBS and News Corporation, which are planning to broadcast TV programming direct to cell phones from their own networks rather than through the networks of traditional cellular service providers.

And we were all wrong. Sony showed a generation ago that people would walk around with stupid-looking earphones on their heads to make music portable and personal. Now, we find that people will watch TV on a 2-inch screen. But when they get tired of doing that, this is still the killer app for head-wearable displays.

Note: We said yesterday that there is a yawning gap in Sharp’s LCD-TV line between the 45-inch and 65-inch models. And indeed there is in the U.S. market. But Sharp informs us that gap will be filled later this month with a 57-inch LCD-TV with “5-wavelength” backlight for expanded color gamut. The Japanese-market version, available since December, uses a hybrid backlight containing both CCFLs and LEDs.