Motorola’s assertion that success in the cable set top box business can be leveraged into success in the smartphone market doesn’t make sense.
From Dow Jones: Motorola Split Signals Further Mobile-Home Video Integration – WSJ.com this article forwards the idea that Motorola’s plan to split up the company…plays well in the integration between the TV and mobile screens.
Let’s be clear, Motorola has been pushing this idea for several years now. Back around 2005, when I was running the Mobile Enterprise Alliance, Motorola was trying to sell business decision makers on the idea that they could take music with them from their home stereo, to their car and ultimately into their office. This was at a time when these same decision makers were trying to get e-mail to work on Blackberry and Windows Mobile. I had more than a few conversations with corporate IT mobility managers who were scratching their heads at Motorola.
These days, the integration between mobile and TV screens remains a pipe dream for many, many, many reasons. The two biggest of which are:
- Consumers have very different expectations for the mobile screen, meaning that it isn’t simply a matter of encoding long-form programming for mobile devices and distributing it as such; and
- The business model for mobile video is very different from the current multichannel environment.
In other words, even if you could find a way to deliver some percentage of multichannel video to mobile devices in a profitable manner that would satisfy the mobile operators, there is nothing to say that consumers would watch…any of it.
Now, let’s suppose that linear broadcast is where mobile video will end up. As in DVB-H or … ATSC M/H here in the U.S. Broadcast is a very different business model than that multichannel (Pay TV) world where Motorola is playing on the set-top box. Linear broadcast (Mobile TV) is a non-starter for the integration this article is talking about.
Which brings us to the core TAM (total available market) question. Motorola’s “two-screen integration” market consists of the intersection between the following groups:
- People who subscribe to Pay TV services;
- Pay TV subscribers serviced by Motorola set-top boxes (STB);
- Pay TV subscribers services by Motorola “Two-screen integration” software, enabling smartphone-to-TV services;
- Smartphone users; and
- Users who watch non-linear mobile video at least once a month.
Which – on first pass – is a pretty small number.
Motorola could succeed in offering something across platforms for the mobile operators, but it’s pretty clear that whatever (if any) integration happens across these two screens, will come from somewhere else in the ecosystem.