A lot of fuzz lately about mobile television. While I’m certainly not waiting for a mobile tv with included PVR functionality to ‘revolutionize the way we watch TV’, it seems that newly conducted studies and reports indicate that mobile TV can potentially become the next ‘killer app’ in the wireless industry. Yet again another channel to interact with the consumer and to advertise or promote your products and services. Interactivity is the keyword here, because the spoiled potential users will expect nothing less than a combination of all available services nowadays. Think of it as a wireless portable pc/(phone?) with built in TiVo and recording possibilities. Only thing missing would then be internet and radio, but that’s just some chips extra.
So, what do I expect? A small device, not bigger than 15/11/1 cm (5.9/4.3/0.3 inch) with a small navigation pad and a maximun display surface, a hard drive of over 150 Gb (without the operating system and software). Browsing possibilities for files and folders for music or motion that I can modify manually (USB to PC!). Wireless internet plug for calendars and planners, email, chat, VoIP calls (GoogleTalk, Skype etc). Also all known phone + pda applications. I want to be able to suck a live tv-signal from the ether and see what’s playing now and I want to select programs and chose when (where, how) to see them. TV on demand; Movies on demand, Radio on demand. better add a GPS-navigation system too, so I can use it in the car, or on foot, or by bike. And I want it at a low price, but with a broadband-styled connection speed. Preferrably in a heavy-duty edition for sportsmen, shockproof and hopefully water resistant. And what do I get?
Introducing : the PDH400 with 4.3-inch widescreen display
Looks pretty cool, but it’s not what I’ve been waiting for. They could’ve saved a lot of space on the navigation pad and added that to the screen surface, but hey… it’s here now. Let’s see what it does.
“What makes the PDH400 so innovative is that it’s the first mobile PVR with a 40GB hard drive (200 hours of recording). An expandable SD-card also supports H.264 streaming, not only can you save your programming for later, you can store it on SD for easy transfer and sharing to other devices.”
“The DVB-H, aka Digital Video Mobile Broadcasts, mobile PVR is Pace’s PDH400 product. With it users can watch TV in real time, in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC encoding (high-quality video streaming compression), a popular Japanese and European terrestrial digital broadcasting standard.” – [MobileMag]
Good start, but I’m not happy yet. This is ‘just’ tv. It’s cool they’ve come this far though, don’t get me wrong… but I’m waiting for a tool that replaces and combines old ones, otherwise it’s just another thing I have to walk around with, and I have to carry already enough around as it is today. With a little more effort from the engineers, this tool could be transformed into a goldmine; totally replacing phones (and thus all this useless tv-on-your-phone crap we’ve been hearing lately) and merging pda and wireless technology with television and digital broadcasting on demand. I’m willing to pay for gadgets like this, but like I said, then I expect progress. Then I would only have to deal with one company that handles all my digital affairs. A nice vision, bound to come true. :)
“Mobile TV: Switching On the Revenue Stream” is a report that investigates the possibilities of mobile television. [The Wireless Weblog] has laid eyes on it and agrees with the study saying it “does make a point that pricing will be a major selling point – users are looking to pay less than $10 a month for mobile TV.” That sounds like a reasonable price indeed, but then again, TWW kind of predicts that most carriers will probably offer a ‘basic subscription’ service for this amount and most likely a lot more will be charged for additional services and options.
Today I saw the first ad on tv promoting 3G for [Proximus], a local carrier so I decided to check out their site. I couldn’t find anything on 3G, in the sense of a description and I got pissed from the lack of user-friendlyness from the search. (there’s a full flash site about it, but I wanted to copy-paste and all this loading time didn’t come in handy) – So I went to ye olde wikipedia to get a nice description for you : 3G is short for third-generation mobile telephone technology. The services associated with 3G provide the ability to transfer both voice data (a telephone call) and non-voice data (such as downloading information, exchanging email, and instant messaging).
I dare any reader to go find something by keyword ‘3G’ on the proximus site without losing their patience. Don’t worry, it’s multi-lingo. You can test your skills in Dutch, French or English. Service? Where?