TV On Mobiles: Not Yet There? 232
rustbear writes "It seems that perhaps Apple did their homework when they decided to downplay the video capabilities of the new iPod. The Guardian reports that "Most [British] people have no desire to watch television on mobile phones, preferring to use home computers to watch TV while on the internet, according to new research. Although 65% of British consumers surveyed cite the mobile phone as their most desired gadget, 70% of mobile owners said they did not want to watch television on their phone at all. Nearly 45% of consumers said they would watch TV on their home computer, because it enabled them to choose what they wanted to watch and when." Is the mainstream market not yet ready for portable video?"
Japan (Score:5, Informative)
Verizon (Score:3, Informative)
-everphilski-
Re:I have never understood (Score:3, Informative)
Business Travel -- if you want to watch a movie at a hotel, you have to pay big bucks (US$10) for a limited selection via the hotel's distribution system.
Traveling with the kids -- makes road trips a lot easier to handle. And to stave off the "but good parents wouldn't need to foster the kids off on an electronic babysitter in the car" crowd -- it's a lot safer to drive when the kids aren't interrupting your focus every 20 seconds.
Commuters -- Those of us who responsibly take mass transit to the office have another way to pass the time.
Crowded houses -- Allows someone to watch a movie without dominating the living room. Can easily be carried from room to room, a better solution than having a TV and DVD player in every room.
Re:The mainstream market is never ready for change (Score:2, Informative)
Let me clarify the point that I was trying to make with my one sentence question (i'm the story submitter).
I feel that you are lumping demand for a specific functionality with demand for a specific bit of technology. In your HDD example, people may not have wanted slower hard drives with less capacity, but they clearly liked the idea of smaller drives, which is why the drives took off. Likewise, portable music players didn't sell well before the iPod, *NOT* because people didn't want to have portable music (they very much did), but because all the players were crap in some way.
On the other hand, in the "TV on mobiles" case, here we potentially have research indicating that people may not even want the underlying functionality at all, no matter how well implemented, and potentially no amount of product maturation will make people want it.
Re:North America different yet again (Score:4, Informative)
The second reason is that a nation's own manufacturers lobby for their system. All of the D-AMPS 800 MHz base stations now seem to have gone to GSM because they can get more voice channels out of a single cell. Not because of the tiny minority of their users who roam internationally.
Bruce
Re:The mainstream market is never ready for change (Score:2, Informative)
Hell, 100 years ago, who would have been able to imagine themselves going from London to Tokyo in less than a month or three? Does that mean there's no demand for air travel?
Demand can be manufactured. Build a better mousetrap...