Himalayan News Service

Beijing, February 19:

TV mobile phones, dubbed the ‘Fifth Media’, have not yet seen an opportunity for rapid growth in China and experts say it will take some time for them to enter people’s lives, Xinhua reports.

A report released by IMS Research said that by 2010 there would be 120 million subscribers viewing TV programmes on mobile phones and the phones would become the ‘Fifth Media’, besides newspaper, radio, television and computer networks. Analysts said Asian subscribers more readily accept new mobile phones than other users.

In the face of the lucrative market, Chinese companies have taken steps to start this business. Before the May Day holiday in 2004, China Unicom launched a service to provide TV programmes to mobile phone subscribers. Not long after that, China Mobile started a TV mobile phone service through its GPRS network.

Despite a promising future, TV mobile phones are still at their early stage of development in China due to limited broadband capacity, limited choice of handsets, much higher prices and lack of standards and policies.

China’s TV programmes are currently transmitted to mobile phones through 2.5 or 2.75-generation networks, which are not sophisticated enough to convey high-quality TV signals.

The download speed of GPRS is only 25 kbps and that of China Unicom’s CDMA1X is 60-70 kbps, which is far from the 128 kbps required for high-quality TV broadcasts.

High prices have also bottlenecked China’s TV mobile phones. China Unicom subscribers have to pay at least $24 for one hour’s programming on mobile phones.

Reports said some operators are in negotiations with China Mobile on providing TV services for mobile phone subscribers with a fixed monthly fee of around $12, aiming to cut the price of watching TV on mobile phones.

Handsets that can currently receive TV signals sell at approximately $600. This makes them unpopular when most other handsets cost $120-$240.

The short lifespan of their batteries — three days to a week for general use, but just one hour for watching TV — also limits the use of TV mobile phones.