MobiTV have announced their subscriber figures, according to Moco News. Across a network consisting on a few US and Canadian carriers, and Orange in the UK, they’ve reached 500,000 people. If the average subscription price is $9.99, this is going to be quite a healthy income, especially given that it’s still early days.

Of course, in percentage penetration terms, this is still tiny and we also don’t know what kind of free and subsidised trial packages might be included. Plus it’s too early also to come up with any meaningful churn rates.

Personally, I’m extremely sceptical about subscription-based mobile TV as a business model, especially at the $9.99 level. But if they have the potential to attract and keep viewers in the millions, it’s not out of the question to see advertising subsidised services emerging.

The other element everyone always overlooks when thinking about new services and products is the percentage of people who say they’ll subscribe or buy, pointing to things like “only 25%” said that they will. The percentage isn’t actually that important (up to a point, obviously) provided that the ones indicating an interest really mean it and are really passionate about it.

As a parallel, if you do focus groups on new car design, you’d think that intuitively you be looking for a design that was liked by the most number of people. This is wrong. What you actually need is a design that is loved by 10% to 30%, with the rest feeling ambivalent or actually hating the car. It’s the people with the passion who actually will go out and buy your product.

Clearly MobiTV has a long way to go before it commands anything like 10% of the subscriber base as customers. But, if accurate, this is a certainly good start.

Me? I’m still wary about this service and business model (certainly at this pricing), but I could be wrong - there’s enough companies placing big bets against me, so maybe it has some kind of future after all.