I find it always kind of magical when analysts predict 5 years ahead of the current market. The telecom industry is now - it seems - back to linear growth, which indeed makes forecasts pretty easy for everyone who can draw a straight constantly rising line on a piece of paper with a ruler.

Now when it comes to new products and services things look entirely different. I still think that noone can honestly predict what the user numbers for something entirely new will look like in 5 years out. In fact I think that people who try and sell this as reports should highlight in their press releases the many times that they have been entirely wrong with such predictions in the past. I once met an analyst who covered the optical networking space. We had dinner during an industry conference and talked about the market, the current players and at some point about his work too. He was one of the top analysts in that space but what he told me was something I always suspected: "If I look back to my now more than 5 years of work in this market and see how many of my forecasts were correct it is certainly much less than half."

Now coming back to the In-Stat forecast which predicts a growth from now 3.4 million mobile TV users in 2006 to 100 million in 2010. I think mobile TV will take off, but the time will depend on the content that is being provided, the quality of the initial services, the handsets made available and of course how long it will take to deploy the broadcast infrastructure everywhere. All of the above things are somewhat in the make right now but incumbents are using their current trials to figure out how fast they should move forward. To me it is possible that it goes faster than In-Stat predicts but it could also be 10 years out still. So in short a great place for smarter people than us to sell reports and a glance into the magic ball... I did do so on http://www.flash-gear.com/8/ and entered: "Will mobile TV grow as fast as analysts predict?" Answer: "Outlook good." Don't trust magic balls, I thought, so I ran it again. Second answer: "You may rely on it." Ok, now I am also convinced.