At the
NAB show in April 2012, Peter Siebert of Europe's DVB Project Office said DVB-H did not succeed because so few devices were available, mainly because content producers would not subsidize them.
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The competing technologies - like
MediaFLO in the US - did not have any success, new sales were terminated in December 2010 and the allocated spectrum sold to AT&T. These 1st generation transmissions protocols are not very spectrum efficient, but the fatal problem seems to be the lack of business model for mobile-TV. Very few have been willing to pay for the services. Even with a free mobile-tv signal, the daily use was often just a few minutes a day.
The Dutch KPN is an example. KPN quote lack of receiving devices, but even when KPN's service was initially free the average daily use was a mere 9 minutes pr phone having a DVB-H receiver. (TV is typically watched 2–3 hours per day)
The 4G/LTE which soon will be standard in all smartphones. 4G/LTE is already being used in many countries and will very likely be able to provide the needed capacity for mobile-TV within most peoples download maximum (Max GigaBytes).
4G/LTE has the potential of efficient multicast, which can increase the spectrum efficiency in broadcast type application to within a factor of maybe two compared to the newest (e.g DVB-T2/T2Lite) broadcast protocols.