The mobile and entertainment industries are increasingly merging and next week, from December 5^th to 7th, a very interesting mobile and media business conference sponsored by Informa telecoms & media is about to take place in Suntec/Singapore. On Wednesday the “mobile TV Asia Summit” is taking place, followed by the two days event of “Mobile entertainment Media Asia 2007”.

The event is tagged: “Where media meets mobile in Asia”. So it combines two of the most dynamic industries with the most dynamic region.

With South Korea and Japan Asia has the two most sophisticated mobile markets in the world and it also the growth motor of global mobile industry. Hence both events offer the chance to understand this region better as well as to learn and take best practices from the world’s leading. The event is an excellent platform for networking and to make business partnerships which will enhance any Asian market business strategy or benchmarking projects.

The conferences will feature agenda setting keynote sessions, and streams discussing the most exciting industry issues. It’s truly an honor

for me to be selected to chair the “Mobile TV Asia Summit” on Wednesday December 5^th. I will be the first to speak with the title, “Accelerating the Uptake of Mobile TV in Asia”. Afterwards I will be moderating the remaining sessions and discussions.

I sincerely hope to meet many of you interested and I look forward discussing with you.

For more information on the events visit here.

There are rumors in Korean press that SK Telecom is hesitant to inject more money in its S-DMB business and TU Media, because reaching the break-even is unlikely. Although subscribers have reached almost 1.3 million in September 2007 TU Media has generated only losses. Together with initial investments of about 250 million USD overall this venture could have cost SK Telecom more than 500 million USD since beginning of operation.

There are several factors for missing commercial success of S-DMB, some of them are:

1. Targeting the mass market SK Telecom has underestimated the importance of acquiring popular contents from terrestrial TV. Upon the launch of S-DMB it had been too naïve and expected to get rights for retransmitting contents from the broadcasters. However with T-DMB in the pipeline they had been reluctant to share these contents.

2. Launching the satellite (it had been launched in cooperation with a Japanese company MBCo) and building the infrastructure almost by itself required significant funding, estimated to be about 250 million USD.

3. When entering the market it relied too much on existing skills and thus pursued a subscription based model, making a success on the mass market very unlikely.

4. Also Korean government is not free from blame. It issued licenses for mobile TV to two different parties with a diametrically different approach. Subscription based S-DMB and free T-DMB. Due to this both sides could not exploit the full market potential of mobile TV in Korea.

5. Being direct competitors in the mobile market KTF and LG have been reluctant to promote S-DMB, because it is a service of a direct competitor.

Although TU Media has not been a commercial success it can provide very valuable lessons to interested players in the mobile TV market, especially in the Western world where mobile TV is about to be launched.

1. Content is king – it has to be tailored to your targeted audience else your business is doomed. If targeting the mass market popular formats from TV is crucial.

2. Initial investments have to be balanced carefully and should not burden the future development too much.

3. Especially as an MNOs may not underestimate the importance of the right content.

These are just some of my thoughts. I am currently working on a report about the lessons learnt from two years of mobile TV market in Korea in which these things will be elaborated in more detail. Once it is finished I am willing to share it with everybody who is interested. So please do not hesitate to contact me.

A Korean gaming news website published results of a survey among young internet users. The survey has been conducted by two websites www.Puppyred.com and www.ontooniverse.com among 86.000 surfers aged 8-13. Puppyred.com is something like Second Life for children, whereas Ontooniverse.com is a website of a cable TV program comparable to Cartoon Network. Despite a likely bias in the survey population some of the results are fascinating and frightening at the same time.

Approximately 62% of the participants use the internet 1-2 hours a day. This may not sound a lot to you but in Korea even young school children return from school around 6 p.m. or even later. Subtracting time for having dinner and eventual homework these two hours represent probably 80%-90% of their free time during one day. This is underlined by the fact that 92% surf from home. What do the kids do online on their virtual playground? Well the same thing we used to do on real playgrounds, i.e. playing (39% play online games) and meeting friends (27% work on their “Minihompi” or visit their friends’ “Minihompis”). In connection to that it is not surprising that CyWorld is the second most popular website (29%) just after naver (57%).

This trend underlines the appearance of a truly digital youth. However in Korea it gets an almost dangerous dimension which ultimately will further increase problems like internet addiction. On the other hand this early embrace of the internet and its virtual worlds is a good explanation why Koreans usually are regarded as tech savvy, which enhances the development of new services and businesses in the TMT sector.