Endemobile reality check : mobile soaps and bubbles

Endemol's Peter Bazalgette announced two new mobile channels : Extreme Reality Channel and a future Comedy channel.




Freemantle Media Licensing Worldwide announced a mobile version of The X Factor with MIG (Mobile Interactive Group).
Freemantle's rather classical approach shouldn't bring much disruption to the market. No big Fear Factor for Endemol : they intend to shake mobile TV the way they did with SMS (remember Big Brother and Veronica ?) with "a non-stop parade of the bizzarrest and weirdest video clips from the world of entertainment". According to the not so entertaining Endemol Mobile website, content will partly be "based on the huge back catalogue of Endemol".
I wonder what's more depressing : an microerzatz of existing soaps or the most extreme worst of reality TV trash, straight from the bin. 3G is fine, wait till they get 3D and odorama...

Mobile Real TV - LG and the H-free handset

Nokia are to duplicate in the Netherlands their Finnish Mobile TV experience, with KPN starring as Telia-Sonera and Nozema Services + Digitenne as Elisa. In this RealMobileTV* show, you don't care where the customers come from : whatever the casting, everybody ends up telling how great the experience was. Plus PR people can relieve themselves in public (in Dutch for Nozema or in English for Nok-Nok).
This time, the plot is about mixing broadcasting and mobile with as many users as possible and in a truly mobile environment (thus the coverage of railways and motorways). The Finns provide the already vintage DVB-H 7110 plus a IPDC solution (sounds like the heavy metal version of IP), the Dutch their bad taste for programming (remember where Endemol and Big Brother came from ?). Nozema already confessed an affair with the Wi-Fi - WiMAX - Mobile-Fi (802.20) family.
But guess which manufacturer could make mobile TV on handsets a true hit in Europe ? The inventors of DVB-H, Nokia ? Nah... LG decided to launch their 3G - T-DMB phone next year in Europe and China. LG-V9000 will be up for grabs Q1 2006, on time for the 2006 World Cup in Germany : LG happens to be a top sponsor and intends to become a top lobbyist for the Korean norm. Even if the Chinese team didn't make it through the qualifiers. Even if T-DMB competes more directly with DVB-T (already commercialized in many European countries) than with DVB-H. Even if no DMB network has been announced yet in Europe.
Well. LG are also into bigger TV screens, and you don't have to be a mobile operator to roll out DMB. Consumers shouldn't give a hyphen provided the service works. They might even dig the motto used to sell this rolla : "personal mobile (digital) TV".

* guess what : realmobiletv.com is available but mobilerealtv.com has already been locked by some guy living on Sunset Bvd. If he sells Palms, I gather they're not of the tree kind.