The FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup is one of the most popular sport events, followed by millions of football (soccer) fans around the world. According to FIFA, the 2006 World Cup in Germany was aired in 43,600 broadcasts in 214 countries, generating 73,072 hours of coverage. A cumulative audience of 26.3bn people watched the 64 matches, and of those, only 2.1bn watched in their homes.
Events of this magnitude always present a sizable revenue opportunity for traditional pay-TV providers. The last World Cup, however, demonstrated that mobile operators that provide mobile video and mobile TV service also stand to benefit from such events, albeit to a lesser scale than their larger screen cousins. Prior to the 2006 World Cup, an Italian mobile operator, 3 Italia, launched Walk TV, its mobile TV service. According to 3 Italia’s CEO, after six weeks of the launch, 110,000 mobile users subscribed to Walk TV, and after 5 months the operator reported 250,000 subscribers. While mobile TV is still in its infancy in regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and Central and Eastern Europe, in other regions such as Western Europe and Asia-Pacific, it may engage up to 4% of the total mobile subscribers by 2014.
During the 2006 World Cup, the cumulative TV audience in Europe reached 5.33bn, up 29.6% from the 2002 event, with Germany and Italy accounting for 31.5% of the total audience. Undoubtedly, millions of European viewers will be following the upcoming 2010 World Cup, and the choice of device on which they choose to follow the action is set to be wider than ever. FIFA has openly embraced the potential of mobile TV/video to broaden the tournament’s already widespread popularity. This recognition by the sport’s governing body, together with the BBC’s announcement of an app that will allow UK sports fans to enjoy live coverage of the tournament for free, provide two important cornerstones for making the 2010 World Cup truly mobile.
With the recent skyrocketing proliferation of smartphones and the noteworthy increase in mobile Internet bandwidth across Europe, many Europeans may opt to watch the matches on their mobile handsets, giving operators, broadcasters and handset vendors a stage to display the best of mobile TV and video. (While mobile TV is a subcategory of mobile video, in order to maintain a focus on concise analysis of the geographic differences in adoption, mobile TV and video are addressed as one platform throughout most of this report, unless indicated otherwise.)
The efforts to grab end-user mindshare and prove to them that mobile TV and video are now viable entertainment platforms will lead to richer product offerings that are likely boost mobile video and mobile TV adoption in Europe. The degree of this effect will, however, vary from market to market. Pyramid Research projects that the 2010 World Cup will boost the uptake of mobile video and mobile TV services in Western European (WE) markets, while the effect on the service adoption in most Central and Eastern European (CEE) markets is likely to be negligible. In 2010 the number of mobile video users (including mobile TV) will increase by 8.4m in WE, while in CEE, the market will see only 1.5m additional mobile video users. The service adoption gap between the two regions will further widen throughout the forecast period.
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