Putting the squeeze on the late, late mobile TV

[slitchfield]

I ponder the late arrival of DVB-H (will it appear in your neck of the woods in 2008?), the general lack of enthusiasm for mobile TV and the rise and rise of YouTube, along with cheaper bandwidth and native S60 players. Will mobile TV's niche be so small that no company or country will bother to put in the infrastructure at all?

Read on in the full article.

[krisse]

I'd say the same thing could be extended to broadcasting in general.

For example, is there any reason for broadcast radio to exist if we can listen to a hundred thousand internet radio stations from any phone anywhere in the world?

If someone can come up with a simple and cheap way to watch high quality internet TV, broadcast TV in general might bite the dust.

Obviously the broadcasters will do their best to stop these new media, but history seems to tell us that luddites can only hold out for so long before a new technology overcomes them. For example, no one talks about coal barons any more.

I used to work for World DMB who promoted the competing mobile television standard DMB. The reason DVB-H isnt working in say the UK is because there has been no available bandwidth, there still isnt a working trial of DVB-H in the UK! DVB-H requires a large chunk of bandwidth to transmit so has had problems finding 'space'. Nokia have plumped for DVB-H, and because of the politics/bandwidth issue mobile TV is pretty much dead until its available. (Of course if they had gone with DMB, it could be set up far quicker and cheaper - however the Korean firms have gone for that but arent really pushing it unfortunately). Mobile TV is still a while away..

With emTube and Slingplayer now fully functional on S60, there is no need for mobile TV. It has become the victim of its own slowness in roll-out and may face the possibility of being obsolete even before it is launched.

[Karlo_N80ie]

i second the comment above saying that emtube and sling will end up dominating over mobile tv.

i'm very happy with my current n95 classic but now it has amazed me yet again
with emTube and just earlier, the slingbox. i'm from canada and i never thought that i could make it work but it does!

also, the whole point of 'all-in-one' / convergence is having one thing that does all (well, almost). the way i have my tv set up is that i have a satellite subscription for HDTV on a PVR receiver. i dont want another 'tv' bill for my phone and i don't have to watch what happens to be on. i can control my tv from anywhere with the n95 with full functionality (watch and record), and having only one bill. and when i get home, it's as if my tv and my n95 are synced.

[fernando20]

Well, I'm all for having a mobile Joost, that would rule.

[malerocks]

Well, phone manufacturers always load stuff onto their handsets, hoping that service providers will start supporting them. This helps manufacturers give a 'novelty' to their handsets, but unfortunately not everything catches on.

For instance, take push-to-talk and MMS. I dont think there are too many users of either of these 2 services. But they just exist.

Yup, EmTube, Vtap and streams from the BBC and the like will kill mobile TV, you simply can't have normally scheduled TV on a device that doesn't sit in front of a couch.
It has to be on demand and nothing is better for that that internet videos., plus the reception is far-far better.

[DevilsRejection]

the thing that kills me about DVB-H is that it is the same video broadcast to our television while internet video is perfect for mobile since they're usually shorter.

not to mention my biggest gripe, which steve mentioned, is pull versus push. i want to watch something i care about, not what happens to be on.

I watch the T-Mobile Sky Sports for live soccer but that's all I need, you can't really do live any other way but broadcast.

Yes I know there is a 5 second delay.

You may like mobile TV or not, but there seem to be a lot of misunderstandings...

First off, there is no reason you can't broadcast different content via mobile TV than you do for home TV. In fact, feedback from some trials has suggested this is exactly what broadcasters should be doing. As DevilsRejection already says, you're likely to want shorter content "snacks" while on the move. Other ideas include broadcasting popular TV shows (soaps, reality TV etc.) at different times to home TV such as peak commuting hours.

Secondly, mobile TV does not automatically mean DVB-H. There are other standards and there are active services out there (just not here in the UK). As previously mentioned, there is DMB which has been in use in South Korea for a few years now. Japan has had a OneSeg ISDB-T service for over a year now too. And DVB-H is broadcasting in some countries too.

Finally, what everyone seems to be forgetting is that video-on-demand services (YouTube, Joost, etc. etc.) are one-to-one connections between you and a server somewhere on the internet using a certain amount of bandwidth. There more users there are, the more connections and the more network bandwidth is used. Unfortunately the bandwidth on cellular networks is finite. If too many people start using video services over 3G or whatever that limit will be reached quite quickly and no more people can connect. Broadcasts don't have that problem - you can have as many receivers picking up a signal as you like.
Sure networks will get faster and bandwidth will go up, but then so will the quality of content. We might be happy with highly compressed, QVGA resolution and mono sound now, but in a few years we'll probably expect more. We'll want higher framerates and sharper pictures. Bottom line, if VOD goes truly mainstream we'll keep hitting those limits.

Therefore I suspect we'll see a mix going forward. Mobile TV will have it's place for mainstream content (potentially at high video quality) that lots of people are likely to watch even if it means tuning in at a certain time or setting a timed recording (some of the TV phone already out there can record video off the TV for later watching. Who knows, they may evolve into mini PVRs someday). VOD will be there alongside for more specialist content.

[richardyates]

Don't write off DVB-H - in the UK we need the digital TV switchover to be complete before the frequencies are available. In Italy, where they have been available for some time, mobile TV packages are big business - have a look at www.tre.it - you don't need to speak Italian

I think there is a misunderstanding here about what DVB-H really is. DVB-H is not Mobile TV but a broadcast radio technology for carrying IP protocol. With DVB-H, one can deliver between 5 and 11 Mbits per second of IP data to an _unlimited_ number of devices in the coverage area. Multiply that by the number of seconds in a day and the result is a very big number.

Live TV is one obvious application but by no means the only one. With the data rates achievable with DVB-H, it's possible to build content services where all the content is automatically delivered to the devices in the background as files. This means gigabytes of high-quality content that can be consumed without lag or even network connection (e.g. in a plane).

Making comparisons to 3G, 3.5G or 4G networks is meaningless, because the achievable bit rates in those networks are one-to-one from the transmitter to a single device using a shared medium. Emtube and the like are fantastic applications, but only if those are used by very few people in a given cell. The fact that data charging is flat rate does not mean there is limitless bandwidth for everyone.

[slitchfield]

I did make that point about possible bandwidth problems twice in my piece. 8-)

Two years ago I was DVB-H's biggest fan. But the waiting and the waiting and the waiting..... it gets me down.

In the meantime, emTube over any Wi-Fi connection is fast, flawless, available now and doesn't hog any cell bandwidth.....

[Daniel222]

Maybe mobile TV is not for watching TV content on a tiny screen but to see things that happen (and are captured) on the go?
There is a lot of activity going on in the mobile live broadcast arena these last few weeks. You can see players like Flixwagon [www.flixwagon.com] and others leveraging the fact that most of us today carry a cam phone at hand and can easily broadcast live interesting life pieces.
Watching life pieces on the mobile screen that are happening to your friends right now makes more sense than watching your favorite sitcom.