Will You Be Hopping on the Mobile TV Viewing Trend?

There's no escaping it: we're officially in the mobile age. Well, almost. The trends nowadays all point to mobile or going mobile, and we've got two studies to support that claim: one by Cisco, and one by Juniper.

Let's start with Cisco's, first. The firm says that because of the tablet boom, mobile traffic will skyrocket to to 10.8 exabytes per month. That's 130 exabytes every year, equivalent to the same amount of data that can be stored on 33 billion DVDs. Cisco also predicts that by 2016, there will be an estimated 10 billion mobile connections all over the world, several billions more than the human population (which will be about 7.3 billion by then, according to the United Nations.)

The second study is by Juniper, which reports that growing user satisfaction now has more people reaching for their tablets to stream television shows. This trend will push the number of minutes that people spend on mobile TV to 186 minutes per month by the year 2014.

The rise of mobile TV is attributed to many reasons: more variety, flexible subscription packages, and the integration of mobile service with pay-TV subscriptions.

"Consumers are already accustomed to timeshifting thanks to DVRs such as TiVo and Sky+; what mobile TV allows them to do is placeshift. This allows users to watch their pay-TV content anytime, anywhere and on any device -- the TV experience is no longer confined to the home."

-- Charlotte Miller, report author

One more tidbit Juniper's report reveals is that the number of users who will be jumping on the mobile TV trend will increase by a factor of 2.8 in between 2011 and 2016.

Will you be hopping on the mobile TV trend to join the millions of other people who are already getting their TV fix by way of mobile? Or are you already one of them?

Article by Hazel Chua
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