Saturday, April 08, 2006
1-SEG
1-SEG? One-Seg? wansegu?
In Japan the nickname for digital mobile TV is written in Katakana: ワンセグ (pronounced wansegu). Japanese people love to abbreviate - oneseg is short for One Segment. Why?
The reason is technical: digital TV is broadcast in certain radio frequency channels. Each TV station (e.g. NHK, Fuji-TV, TBS etc) uses one particular 6 MHz wide frequency channel for digital TV broadcasts. Each channel is divided into 14 segments, and one segment is used for digital TV to mobile phones, while the other remaining 12 segments are used for high-definition digital TV, while the 14th segment is used as a buffer between adjacent channels to avoid interference.
In Japan the nickname for digital mobile TV is written in Katakana: ワンセグ (pronounced wansegu). Japanese people love to abbreviate - oneseg is short for One Segment. Why?
The reason is technical: digital TV is broadcast in certain radio frequency channels. Each TV station (e.g. NHK, Fuji-TV, TBS etc) uses one particular 6 MHz wide frequency channel for digital TV broadcasts. Each channel is divided into 14 segments, and one segment is used for digital TV to mobile phones, while the other remaining 12 segments are used for high-definition digital TV, while the 14th segment is used as a buffer between adjacent channels to avoid interference.
Mobile TV
Digital mobile TV started officially in Japan on April 1, 2006 after several months of testing. Japan's media industry is large - Japan's broadcasting industry alone is about US$ 40 billion sales/year, so mobile-TV will probably develop into a multibillion-$ industry over the next few years. At the moment there is a chicken-and-egg situation: content providers need a market with lots of subscribers, but subscribers will only buy handsets if there is enough good content. So investment and a longterm view is necessary to jumpstart this new market.
Apparently about 500,000 mobile phones with digital TV have been sold already - KDDI started selling mobile phones for digital terrestrial TV (1-SEG) from autumn 2005, while DoCoMo introduced the first digital TV handset only a few weeks ago.
According to major phone retailers, buyers are mainly men in the 25-35 age group. So there are some more steps to do until mobile TV goes mainstream, for example, making mobile-TV enabled phones smaller and more attractive for female customers.
Viewers can watch TV and they can purchase & download the music, join fan clubs and much more:
First simple estimations by our team based on analysis of Japan's TV industry and on the development of i-mode in Japan show that the mobile TV industry segment in Japan may well reach a volume of US$ 4 billion or more within a few years for m-commerce, advertising and other business combined.
...more about mobile-TV: download our mobile-TV report
Apparently about 500,000 mobile phones with digital TV have been sold already - KDDI started selling mobile phones for digital terrestrial TV (1-SEG) from autumn 2005, while DoCoMo introduced the first digital TV handset only a few weeks ago.
According to major phone retailers, buyers are mainly men in the 25-35 age group. So there are some more steps to do until mobile TV goes mainstream, for example, making mobile-TV enabled phones smaller and more attractive for female customers.
Viewers can watch TV and they can purchase & download the music, join fan clubs and much more:
First simple estimations by our team based on analysis of Japan's TV industry and on the development of i-mode in Japan show that the mobile TV industry segment in Japan may well reach a volume of US$ 4 billion or more within a few years for m-commerce, advertising and other business combined.
...more about mobile-TV: download our mobile-TV report
