• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, May 7, 2007

Mobile TV entertainment may be the moving wave of the future, but right now advertisers, for the most part, are just idling at the traffic light. 

Though many studios -- from Warner Bros. to Fox to MTV Networks -- have produced new series or different versions of series for cell phone users, advertising has been slow-moving.

Sure, there's been some business -- $421 million in 2006. But this is nothing like the explosive growth some have been predicting.

Measurement is a big issue. Though Nielsen has pledged to find and calculate TV viewers anywhere, anyhow, it's still far away from identifying specific details: What are the demographics? Are those viewers watching just part of the show? Will they watch later? And how does that count in total viewership?

Advertisers have been known to experiment -- but maybe with the rash of new entertainment technology, there is only limited R&D money to go around.

It's hard to even determine what mobile entertainment will look like.

One key observation comes from Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks Music and Logo Group, who told The New York Times he imagined a time when he could make a 90-minute movie -- in 30, 3-minute increments.

One assumes that's because the attention spans of phone users -- mostly young people -- don't last much longer than three minutes. 

How can advertisers align themselves? Do they get a dreaded 15-second pre-roll commercial at the beginning of each piece of 3-minute content?  Perhaps it might come in the middle -- with no fast-forwarding, of course. 

Already many cell phone users believe any content is virtually pure marketing - and nothing more. How do advertisers factor that into their price? Is a two-inch screen one-sixteenth the price of a 32-inch plasma in your living room?

Maybe the market really is for sharper and younger eyeballs, after all. Maybe it isn't the broad-based entertainment medium everyone thinks.

As is usual with media entertainment technology, user trends never end predictably. With VCRs, we were all going to create our own network prime-time schedules (which may now be actually happening with the DVR).

Perhaps mobile phones will be a way to watch a 3-minute live video of the person we are talking to -- and nothing more.  Perhaps someone will realize no one wants to hold his phone for three minutes to watch a TV show.

With this new media still in flux, advertisers aren't gunning their engines.