Mobile TV is heading for a fall

Has mobile TV simply failed us all the way around? It sure appears that way. And we have PC Pro to help explain why.

Is anyone, apart from those who stand to reap the financial rewards, really getting excited about mobile phone TV? It’s a potentially enormous breakthrough for media on the move, and yet I’m still to meet anyone willing to show off the technology. Even mobile phone outlets don’t seem to want to educate customers about it.

This is despite the fact that operators O2, Orange, 3 and Vodafone are investing heavily in the newest ruse to increase our monthly payments, while the BBC, ITV and Sky see live mobile TV as the new frontier for squeezing extra viewing minutes out of us each day.

On paper, mobile TV is an operator’s dream: it makes each one of the millions of subscribers nationwide a potential premium customer every time there’s a big sporting event, a major news story or even just a spare five minutes.

Unlike most technology breakthroughs, this particular one seems to be coming sooner than most people anticipated. But with the World Cup drawing attention to the mobile industry, dazzling new designs being launched in Asia and constant talk of the new
frontier for broadcasting, are we being hoodwinked by headlines promising a technology that’s actually years away from being ready for the mainstream?

Well, some people are already viewing TV on their mobiles. Orange and Vodafone have been offering a live mobile TV service of sorts for months, while O2 has been testing one on a limited scale for some time and is claiming positive results…. Source: pcpro.co.uk

[tags]technology,mobile tv,bbc,educate,itv[/tags]