Three enter, two come out

And now it seems the mobile TV market is down to two.
Last week Crown Castle closed its Modeo mobile TV business, leasing the company’s 1600 MHz spectrum to a pair of venture capitalists. It’s unclear what exactly Telcom Ventures and Columbia Capital plan to do with the spectrum, but I’m betting the Modeo brand is done for good.
Modeo’s flame-out provides stark evidence that wireless carriers will control the mobile TV market for the foreseeable future; if there was ever a company that had a shot of going it alone, it was Crown Castle’s Modeo.
Crown Castle was uniquely positioned to build out its own mobile TV network: The company owns 22,000 towers across the country, and could have added a DVB-H component to those towers in order to provide mobile TV service. Further, Modeo had inked content deals with a number of media companies to add TV channels to its
New York City DVB-H trial.
Modeo executives had even discussed the possibility of selling DVB-H receivers straight to consumers, thereby allowing users to watch mobile TV on their laptop, for example, or even their GameBoy, PlayStation Portable or PDA. Although functions like user authentication and billing could pose problems, the business model wasn’t as nebulous as, say, mobile social networking.
But Crown Castle is not a consumer-facing company, nor does it have the weight necessary to entice manufacturers to build DVB-H receivers (unlike Qualcomm, the world’s No. 1 supplier of chips for cellphones).
And Crown Castle’s investors-who have enjoyed steadily rising share prices during the past several years-likely wouldn’t have supported the company’s foray into the direct-to-consumer market, where tastes are fickle and expensive marketing a must.
So now it’s down to two: Qualcomm and Aloha Partners’ Hiwire. Qualcomm, of course, already commands the lion’s share of the market-its two MediaFLO customers count a combined total of 125.8 million subscribers, more than half of the 240 million-strong U.S. wireless market-but Hiwire boasts a solid spectrum position. Indeed, the company’s system supports 24 channels of mobile TV compared with Qualcomm’s current lineup of eight.
There’s one dark horse in the market, however. Local TV broadcasters are pushing to standardize on a mobile transmission technology, which potentially could broadcast a local TV signal to any mobile receiver. But the question remains: Is a carrier partner necessary for mobile TV to take off?