February 22, 2005
ANALYSIS - TV for mobile phones almost ready for prime time
While TV on mobiles is being tried out in nations across the world, it is not yet available to the wider public. But the communications industry has rarely been more united in its embrace of a new technology and the anticipation of success, reports Reuters.
"Tapping the well-entrenched TV viewing habits of the public, market research group Gartner expects that real-time TV to mobile phones will be commercially available across Europe in 2007. The technology itself may be ready sooner.
"Imaging was last year; music is this year; video is next year," said Hugh Brogan, chief executive of British handset maker Sendo.
Orange France said the first 35,000 subscribers of its 3G network watched an average of 25 minutes of live television on their phones in the first two months of operations. Hutchison Whampoa's 3G network "3" in Britain delivered 10 million video music downloads to its subscribers in six months.
But these often patchy video clips should not be confused with clear television images on a mobile phone. Digital TV will come on a separate broadcast network of around 60 different channels.
Consumers will be able to tune into these broadcast networks for as many hours as they want without clogging up the network. It will free up the phone network for those data services such as video telephone that have to be delivered on demand and in real time and for which operators hope to command higher prices.
The new phones will have to deal with both broadcast TV and cellphone communications signals. Nokia said it would launch a model by next year that will be able to receive the European digital broadcast standard for mobile phones, called digital video broadcast for handheld (DVB-H)".
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