Digital commerce specialist Valista wanted to know what people were talking about during the first day of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, so it did a little “snap poll” of about 100 delegates.
The answers it got were surprising. Eighteen percent of respondents suggested the biggest buzz would be around mobile TV and video while 26 percent said technologies, rather than services, would dominate discussions. Finally, the respondents suggested that WiMAX would get more buzz than LTE.
“I don’t think we expected either of those (mobile TV or WiMAX),” said Mark Denton, director of product management at Valista who jokingly accused pollsters of standing outside the mobile TV pavilion. “Mobile TV was mentioned fairly frequently, but it certainly didn’t appear from my perspective to be one of the big buzzes of the stands and the booths that I saw.”
WiMAX, too, which about equally shared pre-show attention with LTE is another area that deserved attention but shouldn’t be that dominating in the open market, Denton said.
“A lot depends on how things shape up in some of the major markets like the U.S. where you have Sprint clearly backing WiMAX and Verizon clearly backing LTE. From our perspective, we’re interested in things that drive more and more content” so either or both would fit with the company’s business plans, he said.
“Mobile TV is an interesting one. It’s something that we’ve looked at on and off. It’s one of those types of contents that you wonder what use there is in a lot of countries,” he said. “TV could be a subscription model that we would support, certainly, but I think we’ll see a lot more interest in individual items of content, maybe clips or spots of video rather than the full TV or movie experience.”