Talking to sources in the telecoms infrastructure world recently, it’s clear that very high speed internet on mobile phones will be generally available in developed markets within the next 5 years. That’s easily enough for lots of IPTV. So true television on your mobile phone is just around the corner, if mobile carrier revenue models can work through the financial maths of it. A few taps on the calculator leads you very quickly to one source of revenue for this - advertising.

Whether it be Wi-Max or one of the other competing standards for high speed mobile internet, the inevitable will happen. That’s 14MB capacities and 12MB regular speeds on your mobile phone. Many operators think this will be a goldmine and solve their declining ARPU (average revenue per user) woes. Well, it will. But not in the way they think. Nobody except a handful of rich businesses will pay top dollar for high speed mobile internet. To hit mass market the connections have to be competitive with domestic ADSL. And that won’t bring bags of cash to mobile operators. But of course up to now most tv worldwide has been funded by advertising. And most advertisers worldwide still have tv dominating their media mix.

So the end game of IPTV on mobile is really obvious. Especially when you consider how tight the demographic targetting can be. Just think about the amount of information a mobile phone carrier has on you. Who you are, how old you are, when you use the phone, who you call. Add tv into this. Knowing what you watch, when you watch there’s no need for Nielsen surveys any more; the operators will have the data directly, in real time.

IPTV on mobile is a goldmine for the industry. 5 years is all it will take. If the operators do the financial maths sensibly. And that’s a big ‘if’ as their track record isn’t so good so far.