Multicast and Individual Service Provisioning in Mobile TV

While mobile TV in most parts of Europe is still in infancy, Italy as the first country of the European Union started to broadcast a mobile receivable TV program in June 2006. At the end of 2006 the number of subscribers reached 500,000. A classical direct revenue model was used. The acceptance of mobile TV is determined by the relation between the willingness to pay (WTP) for a service and the service fee that is charged from the customers. An advertising-based revenue model can be seen as a way to subsidize the mobile TV service fee. Additional context information (e.g. location, time and identity) and the possibility to address customers individually lead to a higher WTP from an advertiser´s perspective. This article describes the conceptual realization of an indirect, advertising based revenue model for mobile TV which includes different strategies for individualization as well as questions about privacy and data protection.