TV Poised For New Golden Age With Mobile

With political advertising going into its biennial hibernation, next year will be a relatively lean one for TV broadcasters. Best case scenario is for revenue to be flat.

But they will have at least one thing to look forward to, mobile DTV.

Today, Mobile Content Venture, led by NBC and Fox, announced that in 2011 at least 40 O&Os and affiliates of the two networks would launch ad-supported mobile services in 20 markets, including 13 of the top 15.

It’s a big commitment, especially given that there will be no revenue to support it for a good long while. But, as MCV co-GMs Salil Dalvi and Erik Moreno point out in our story, it’s needed to convince mobile device makers that mobile DTV is real, that there will be programming to justify putting mobile DTV chip sets in every gizmo that moves.

And it was a good idea making the service free. What better way to get people to sample a product?

Dalvi and Moreno didn’t want to talk about what the stations will broadcast, but from what I hear it will be simulcasts of the stations’ conventional broadcasts or something close to it.

That’s the announcement that MCV should have made if it really wanted to get all the mobile DTV pieces to start falling into place.

In the end, it’s all about programming. That’s what people want. And what they want from broadcasters is what they are accustomed to, the whole wonderful national and local broadcast mix — American Idol, House, The Office, 30 Rock, NFL football and, of course, the local news.

But NBC and Fox just can’t let the stations air all their programming because they don’t own it. In a lot of cases, they just license it from others. They have to clear those copyrights, which is not so easy.

If NBC and Fox were to do that and green-light all their affiliate to air network programming on the mobile platforms, the affiliates would jump all over the opportunity. We would not be talking 40 stations next year. We would be talking 400.

The hundreds of smaller-market network affiliates that make up the Mobile500 are eager to get simulcast permission from the networks, although they remain wary of MCV and its my-way-or-the-highway attitude. It will be interesting to see how relationship between Mobile500 and MCV evolves.

And there is one major sticking point: Even if Fox were to clear the copyrights, I’m betting that it would not grant wholesale mobile simulcast rights to its affiliates.

Right now, Fox and many of its affiliates are battling over retrans revenue. Fox is demanding more fees than its affiliates are now getting from cable and satellite, and Fox will undoubtedly use the mobile rights as a chip in their negotiations. The situation is already ugly.

The MCV’s 20-market announcement had another target: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

The head of the agency that nurtured TV broadcasting through its first 60 years has now concluded that the medium’s day has past, that it is an “obstacle” to the fabulous wireless broadband future he envisions.

In a speech this week in Atlanta, Genachowski once again made the case for stripping spectrum from broadcasting so that it can be made available for the higher purpose of broadband.

Wireless broadband is more deserving of the spectrum because it’s going to improve health care and education and generate countless new job, he said in essence.

Maybe so. But what the chairman fails to realize (or chooses to ignore) is that a large hunk of wireless broadband traffic will be devoted not to the high purposes he talks about, but simply to people trying to amuse themselves with TV on the way to work, in the checkout line or just hanging out.

Regular folks are going to spend a lot more time on their smart phones watching The Simpsons than they are downloading their medical records or researching term papers.

And when it comes to that kind of content, one-to-many broadcasting is the far more efficient use of spectrum.

As the MVC’s Moreno says: “If you wanted to deliver very popular content in a scalable fashion, you would be building a broadcast-based network.

“There is broad consensus … that the broadcast solution is the only way to be able to make content available on mobile devices,” he said. “IP-based networks won’t scale; it will never happen.”

Amen.

The MCV broadcasters still have a lot of work to do. They have to come up with a conditional access system that will give them the option to put some or all of their programming behind a pay wall at some point and they need a solid system for measuring who’s watching.

And they have to get the programming rights square away.

But I think they made their point loud and clear today: Mobile DTV is coming in 2011.

To borrow from Ted Turner: lead, follow or get out of the way.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or [email protected]. You can read more of his columns here.