Satellite TV On A Phone

Fri, Feb 6th 2004 10:51am — Mike Masnick

While I haven't been a huge fan of plans to offer TV signals via a phone, part of that has been due to the quality of the likely offering. Samsung is now saying that they're going to build a new phone that includes the ability to receive satellite TV reception. It's not entirely clear from the article how this is done, or how much it would cost. I'm still not convinced that people really want TV on their mobile phones (better basic phone quality still seems like a bigger priority), but apparently, all of these companies believe that TVs on phones are what customers want - and by offering them satellite TV, they can offer a lot more options. Derek Adds: This is in conjunction with a Korean-Japanese effort headed by SK Telecom called Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, or DMB. Recall that I've been saying that EV-DO in Korea serves up TV snippets and short video clips. The response from the subscribers has been very positive, but the cost of the data traffic is high, and thus prevents adoption. SKT believes that some combination of broadcast from overhead, and 3G data will allow them to reduce the costs associated with mobile video. Don't think of this as "Dish Network" type of satellite TV, though. Sorry, I can't say more about this at this time.

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