YouTube comes to the land of mobile TV

Wednesday's announcement of YouTube getting a Korean language portal may not have as big of an impact on the PC consumption of videos as it will on the country's mobile television standards.

South Korea is home to the world's first mobile TV standard, DMB, (digital multimedia broadcasting) that comes in terrestrial and satellite varieties. Broadcasting officially began on the DMB platform in 2005. Mobile TV penetration is logically higher there than in other countries, especially since T-DMB is provided free of charge in select regions.

South Korea's TU Media, a company offering both free T-DMB, and subscription only S-DMB, gained over a million subscribers to the latter in approximately a year and a half, and was expected to reach profitability by mid-2007.

Now, in the beginning of 2008, Telecoms Korea reports that both T-DMB and S-DMB have around 9 million subscribers. There has been some discrepancy among reports of the distribution of viewers between the two standards, but it appears to be agreed that the free T-DMB has far more.

So far, though, all of the country's DMB providers have posted only losses, and the expenses on TU Media are reportedly piling up.

The high adoption rate of mobile TV in that country paired with high operating costs for the competing mobile TV standards puts YouTube in an ideal position. There is a huge audience watching video on their handsets, and YouTube's mobile-optimized offerings provide a low-cost alternative for content providers to deliver their products to that audience.

With m.youtube.com acting as the browser-based interface, and a dedicated YouTube app currently in beta for Nokia's N73, N95, E65, 6110, 6120, and Sony Ericsson's K800 and W800, there are already effective options for monetizable content delivery to mobile devices.

Standards body ETRI expects the growth of mobile TV in Korea to expand to 50 percent of the country's population by 2010.