China may well define new trends in 3G Video Services

China Telecom has launched 3G CDMA-2000 services in most cities, and China Unicom is soft-launching 3G WCDMA with multiple video oriented services. China Mobile is ramping up the launch of 3G TD-SCDMA, which is largely based on locally developed technologies.

One aspect that one could not ignore is the sheer scale of 3G activities, and what its global impact. The very large subscriber bases makes it difficult to extrapolate subscriber behavior in other countries to China. The recent experience of applications and services such as peer-to-peer streaming by Tencent, is I believe a convincing evidence that Chinese subscribers are far more video-aware than subscribers in other geographies.

It may well be that everybody will be surprised by the response of subscribers to various video applications, including video-calling, mobile video on demand, video ring back tones, and many new services that the highly creative Chinese software developers are likely to create, within the highly dynamic Chinese society. China may well define new trends in 3G video that other smaller countries did not dare to explore.