Let’s be honest: mobile TV hasn’t exactly set the world alight. The reasons are many: the operator services are often a bit shonky even over 3G; non-operator services are pointless if you’re not on a flat-rate data tariff; regulators and technology firms are squabbling over which formats should be used for digital mobile TV here in Europe; and too many broadcasters assume mobile TV means merely simulcasting what’s on the actual telly.
And that’s just a few of ‘em. Anyway, it seems Nokia is under no illusions about the growth (or otherwise) of the sector. “It’s a bit in a turmoil,” said Nokia’s Niklas Savander last week, at an industry conference. “We have seen that there are multiple segments who are not interested in the broadcasting, but rather in downloads. Rollout is slower than we anticipated a couple of years ago.”
Personally, I think he’s on the money with the ‘downloads’ thing. Surely people are most likely to want to use their phones to catch up on stuff they missed at home - time AND place-shifting their TV viewing. And perhaps in the future, they’ll watch more made-for-mobile shows too. But both of those point to downloads rather than live streaming.
Nokia is keen to push the DVB-H standard for digital broadcasting, but perhaps it should be shifting its attention towards making a service that does for TV shows what its Nokia Music Store does for music…
The Nokia Blog came across a demo of the Nokia N96’s DVB-H Live mobile Tv service in action and were good enough to film it.
It’s low quality and the demonstrator doesn’t seem to realise he is being filmed so the phone is only in shot for 70% of the clip, but it does give a good idea of what Nokia’s new baby can do.
A standard protocol for streaming live TV over IP networks (like the Internet) DVB-H isn’t cleared for use here in the UK as yet, although the service should come to Europe later this year.
Motorola has fired a broadside at Nokia’s DVB-H mobile TV products with its own Mobile TV DH01 ‘personal media player’.
DVB-H is the EU-backed mobile TV standard and Motorola’s DH01 will be compatible with it. Like Nokia when it launched DVB-H products, Motorola’s first device (to be unveiled at the CES show in Las Vegas) won’t be a mobile phone.
Motorola’s DH01 will be a paperback-sized device with a 4.3-inch screen supporting up to 16 million colours, and running at 25fps. It also has Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard support capable of storing 90 minutes of TV video on a 256MB card. And you don’t have to worry about running out of juice as the DH01 has four hours of playback time.
As a bonus, to get round that annoying lag in images you get with most mobile TV services as the streaming is buffered, Motorola’s solution will offer a five-minute memory buffer.
According to Mott MacDonald Schema, a UK based independent management consultancy advising the technology, media and telecommunication industries, 95 percent of British mobile users have not accessed mobile TV and those that do use it regularly (which is less than one percent) don’t access it more than once a month. Grim figures indeed.
That is not to say however that it won’t take off (though it has been on the runway for about two years now by our count) as Mott MacDonald Schema believes that in two years mobile TV will be all the rage.
The company cites engaging content, suitable handsets, affordable packages, the scarcity of spectrum and uncertainty around the competing delivery technologies such as DVB-H, T-DMB, Media Flo, 3G MBMS/TDD and DVB-SH as the current stumbling blocks to success for mobile TV.
Have you got that mobile TV industry? There is your to-do list, now go and make it happen you have two years starting now!
(Via Mobile Europe)
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