posted 07 September 2004 02:44 AM            

I said somewhere in this messageboard in the past that 3 million subscriber would be a point where we would see the expansion of video use on mobile phone but I have never seen anyone on the streets in Japan using mobile video but just making audio phone calls. I have to admit that the prediction was wrong.

According to a recent survey, 12% of FOMA's mobile videophone users are using video call one a week or so. But 49% of the handset owners never used videophone on the mobile phone even though it is featured in the handsets.

Some said the quality of video is low and per call charge for video is expensive, not a good lip synchronization from user experiences etc..

To partly address these issues, DoCoMo is going to introduce free service for video calls up to 1000yen or 9USD(roughly equals to 20munites video calls). They want to drive demand by introducing this free service but I think that it is too weak to drive the demands.

As opposed to that,I think that radical marketing measures must be adopted such that they should make strategically set pricing charge for video calls lower than voice calls.

End users think that while they can have a voice call cheaper than video call, that is enough for daily communications, they think that why they have to pay more for just adding video portion with cheap quality. So no point to use mobile video. This perception that end users have with regard to mobile video can be applicable to consumer video in general as well.

posted 09 September 2004 06:49 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by boneyard:
its often easy to make up scenarios in which it could be used and even could be very useful, but custommers can act totally different.

do you perhaps know if they still only use max 64k bit rates for their system?

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I totally agree. Getting revenue and profit out of new products and services are quite difficult things as it is hard to predict whether there are customer demands or not. But the business senario tends to be based on an assumption that suits their expectation.

As for the rates, 64k is used for video. I think that 64k is not enough to send and receive quality video.

keis

posted 17 September 2004 02:28 AM            

Maybe we need to wait until 4G that is planned to come out in around 2010. By that time, much more bandwidth will be allocated for video and display technology will be much more advanced than now. Battery issue has been solved but they are working on micro fuel cell in mobile phones realized sometime in the near future.

And even now you can see an excel spreadsheet on 2.2 inch mobile phone display equipped in recent mobile phones. They are now going to embed PDF viewer as well.

posted 28 October 2004 02:04 AM            

i would like to know what do you think of this service and what do you know about the market. cheers