Mobile TV "needs time to grow"

Executives from ITV ON, Orange and Freemantle Media today said that to be commercially viable, mobile TV would need time to develop as a platform.

Talking at the Next Gen TV conference in London, Nicholas Wheeler, managing director of mobile news service ITV ON said: "It's got to be allowed time to grow and we need to make the customer experience better."

He said the platform needed to move away from "girls, gaming and gambling" content, to focus on content consumers actually wanted.

"We've gone through the phase of boffins making the technology, now we're looking at content," he said.

Claire Tavernier, senior vice president of interactive at Fremantle Media, said it was only last year that the industry really started talking about putting content together specifically for mobile, which she emphasised was difficult to do. "How do you create content that is fun and entertaining, that people will watch again and again in only a minute?" she said.

However, she warned against relying on user-generated content to fill the gap. "UGC is very different. There's too much out there. On mobile you need editors that will format it for the platform," she added.

Deborah Tonroe, head of TV, video sports products and commercial development at Orange added that mobile TV services should not follow the model of UGC websites like YouTube. She said: "There is too much content and a lot of it is rubbish. Providing content that has been editorialised is the key. Look at The X Factor and Big Brother - they feature members of the public, but are brilliantly edited by producers to make them interesting."

Tonroe also said that the mobile industry had been guilty of a lack of transparency in the cost of such services: "We are rising to that challenge. When you go into Marks & Spencer and buy something, they don't charge you twice on the way out."