Government on your cellphone?

A report by Juniper Research that streaming and broadcast video services to cellphones could be a $7 billion business by 2010 has PublicTechnology.net, a British website, wondering if this could mean an exciting new venue for e-government. The technology and business infrastructure has a ways to go, the report says:

Except in Korea, where services were launched in May, broadcast TV via the mobile is very much at the drawing board. We still have a number of different standards jockeying for position. When a standard is finally selected, you have to find spectrum. When you have spectrum, you then have to build a dedicated network. While all the technological issues are being resolved, you have to put together a viable content package. And at the present time, we have no clearly defined value-chain: So who will provide the services? The broadcasters? The operators? An aggregator? Quite clearly a number of options are possible, but these need to be finalised prior to the licensing process.

When it does take off, it's doubtful that e-government will be at top of  most people's subscriptions. In Korea, providers earned $113 million from selling cellphone porn to half of all subscribers.

Jeff Verhoef blogged recently that his local government was still struggling with getting a single digital recording of meetings that could then be written out to multiple formats. If cellphone vid does take off, it's another use for that digital capture.