Mobile TV in Japan - Lessons To Be Learned for Europe?

On April 1st, 2006, mobile TV has entered the commercial deployment phase in Japan the Japanese 1SEG service is a free, digital broadcasting service for mobile devices that has started in 29 prefectures around Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and will be available in all prefecture capitals by the end of the year. The major operators KDDI and NTT DoCoMo are integrating mobile TV into their service set by offering mobile TV handsets and by creating new services that leverage the ubiquitous digital 1SEG broadcasting system in order to generate revenue for their mobile communication services. This talk provides a short briefing of Japan's digital TV broadcasting system (ISDB) and the mobile 1SEG service. We describe business models and exciting new services that have been created for one-seg-enabled devices and report on first experiences from deployment.