Technology Isn't What's Holding Mobile TV Back
from the wash-rinse-repeat dept
Nearly every single year of the past half-decade or so has been touted as "the year of Mobile TV", the year in which the long-heralded service would finally break through and get widespread adoption. It didn't happen in 2008, it didn't happen in 2009, and while the upcoming World Cup is supposed to be a tipping point, we're not holding our breath. What mobile TV backers don't seem to realize is that regardless of whatever new technology they come up with, people just really aren't very interested in mobile TV -- particularly when it's built on a linear, channel-based programming model that's largely fallen out of favor for standard TV viewing. But that doesn't stop the announcements, the latest being that a number of broadcasters are banding together to develop a new national mobile TV service using spectrum they control.Some observers see this as little more than an attempt by broadcasters to head off the FCC, which wants to seize unused broadcast spectrum and refarm it for use by mobile broadband services -- just like the FCC did with analog broadcast spectrum. So the broadcasters want to launch a service "to provide content to mobile devices, including live and on-demand video, local and national news from print and electronic sources, as well as sports and entertainment programming" -- wait, doesn't that sound like the mobile web? But they want to use a variation of the ATSC digital broadcast technology to set up their own closed system, and also go out of their way to say that the network can be used to deliver public-safety information during emergencies. But they still don't explain just how they think they'll build any interest in these services. Maybe getting that government handout based on spurious public-safety claims is their only hope.
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Free is a powerful price
But these free-to-air services have been phenomenal successes in Japan and Korea.
I've been the main guy to say mobile TV wouldn't fly from a $12/month perspective, but free just seems to work...even linear. And then soon enough the phones will get storage cards that can PVR that shiznit right up.
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Re: Free is a powerful price
That's because Japanese and Korean workers sit on trains two hours per day on the way to and from work. In the US we drive and can't really watch TV on our phones during that time. (Although I'd guess some would try.)
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Re: Re: Free is a powerful price
Any waiting room, downtime, kids sports, stadium sports event, live sports events, fox news, headline news, and yeah, even public commuters. Americans love their crap TV. I think that's lame, but it IS a market.
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Re: Free is a powerful price
Of course, as Ima Fish said, public transport is good there. So everybody uses it.
Though you can't actually call anybody on your phone on the train. That is a social no no.
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Re: Re: Free is a powerful price
Interesting.
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Japan and Korea made it free, not sure the U.S. has the will to do it.
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The will try to make the ads "location relevant" as much as possible.
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They actually want us to turn on our portable devices and all simultaneously watch TV programing, including commercials, under the old broadcast paradigm.
Those days are long gone idiots. We're never going back to that. Ever. Even for a huge event such as the Super Bowl, because we'd watch that on our home TVs.
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I might agree with you if this were a theoretical discussion, but the data is in. In markets where this was made available, it has been a big success.
Why? For one reason: it's free. The second reason: it's effortless - no planning ahead, no sideload, no sync, no sling over sketchy networks. I like all those things, and do them myself. But you won't ever go wrong estimating that a sizable market is lazy and cheap, and wants things easy and free.
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here, at least, with the standard channel selection being free to air and broadcast via radio waves, rather than cable, it strikes me that, really, only two things could be holding such a concept back: lack of demand and the non-existance of anything light enough to actually be portable which does not need an external power supply and is actually set up to receive TV signals. (plenty of things hit two out of the three, mind you)
i have a sneaking suspicion that lack of demand might be the big one...
come to think of it, video phones (no, not just mobile phones with cameras in them) seem to fall in a similar slot. the tech's there, it's a nice idea, but almost no one actually seems to want it.
the whole cable tv thing never made much sense to me either, unless it was using some sort of 'pay per view' set up rather than the usual liner channels, really...
well, that's my thoughts on it anyway.
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The digital broadcasts of HDTV in 720p or 1080p are not really a good fit with a mobile phone. You have to decode the signal with all that detail, and display it on a 4" screen with a much lower resolution - wasting the decoding effort and the image detail.
The new digital TV for mobile standards being launched by broadcasters this year use more appropriate mobile resolutions, and are designed for battery-powered mobile devices.
REgarding lack of demand, as the comment above stated, how would we ever know? Not one digital broadcast mobile TV phone is offered on the market here, because the carriers won't subsidize one. The market has no idea of the possibility. Your statement about demand is like asking people in 1999 about their demand for a PVR - no one knows what it is, so demand is zero.
However, for those willing to look outside the US, the Japanese and Korean examples illustrate that demand indeed does exist.
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Pass
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ATSC is a HOME RUN and a hidden gem
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Who actually watches video on your cell phone
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Re: Who actually watches video on your cell phone
This would be free.
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video will take a while
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I've posted this somewhere else, in response to what someone said, and I figured I'll post it here, though it might be somewhat out of context.
"The government decides who can and can't broadcast on what frequencies. They base their decisions on who can pay the most and since those who can pay the most have something in common, it allows those who have such a thing in common to censor the views of those who don't have that attribute in common. They deserve to express their ideas as well. The merit of an idea is not based on whether one can afford its widespread communication. The government laws in place favor the views of those who can pay the most for the radio stations."
http://forums.kkms.com/m_4168315/mpage_6/key_0/tm.htm
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