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Cellphone TV for 2010 action

Johannesburg - Cellphone TV may indeed be available during next year's World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa.

A temporary licence will be awarded to one service provider. It will expire two weeks after the final match.

If everything goes according to plan, the service provider that receives this licence will be able to provide viewers with a temporary cellphone TV service to enable them, for instance, to watch soccer highlights directly on their cellphones.

At its latest meeting Cabinet accepted a proposal for issuing this temporary cellphone TV licence.

The announcement of a commercial cellphone TV service that involves direct broadcasting of digital content to cellphones has so far been on ice because, among other things, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) has neither issued these licences nor finalised the regulations.

DStv Mobile, one such service, has been tested by MultiChoice since 2005 and is currently free. It offers channels like CNN, SuperSport and Cartoon Network.

MultiChoice has said that it has wanted to introduce the service commercially in South Africa, but this is dependent on receiving a broadcast licence from Icasa, among other things.

In response to enquiry as to who would receive the temporary licence, Icasa said it was on the point of issuing the relevant regulations.

Steven Ambrose, a telecommunications analyst and managing director of WWW Strategy, greeted this announcement with scepticism.

He argued that there was no market momentum or consumer interest in such a service.

Ambrose referred to the latest Mobility 2009 survey, which indicated that about 15% of the respondents had cellphones with the ability to receive cellphone TV, but that fewer than 1% used them to watch the free test channels.

  • MultiChoice, Sake24 and Fin24 are in the Naspers stable.

- Sake24.com

For more business news in Afrikaans, go to Sake24.com.

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