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Television on your Phone
zxnos writes "Television on mobile is all geared up to be the next big thing as UK provider Orange, rolls out a mobile handset service, which will offer customers top TV shows and channels.
Channels such as Cartoon Network and CNN will be made available for a monthly subscription of £10. This will be UK's first TV-on-the-mobile service, which will allow customers to watch news, sport and entertainment programmes on their phone."
We could only get reruns of the original ScreenSavers on phone, on demand
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
Why would anyone want a phone on their TV? I mean sure it might be convenient, but what if I've been making calls the battery goes flat? I can't watch TV!
Why can't I get a TV which is just a TV?
Well it's just another way of paying for something I can normally get for free. Yes CNN is a FTA Channel.
...a beowulf cluster of boxen running linux streaming pr0n to Soviet-Russia cellphones who owns you!
...that people using their phones while driving was a problem before?
finally, mobile pr0n !
oooh, tv on a inch square screen! leave the TV to the TVs. an RSS feed would be much better.
Instead of yet another service to be charged for, what about receiving broadcast TV?
Geez...
I see all these new mobile technologies develop. Mobile web access, 3G networks, multimedia content, picture mail.... these are all well and good.
What I question is why there isn't more urgency on working on the increasingly insufficient battery life of the modern mobile device. This is not restricted to cell phones, either, but is particularly relevant in this case. The more features we jam-pack into these phones, the more and more our talk time (which is why we call these devices cellular telephones and not something else: they should make phone calls) tanks. Granted, much technological innovation and research is being done globally with hydrogen fuel cells, increasing efficiency of solar technologies, etc.... but the effort spent adding another gimmick (or feature, whichever is less offensive to you) is wasted when this mobile power problem for these devices seems ever the more relevant....
Though the possibility of watching Scrubs at work to make my bosses that much madder at me seems enticing....
Seriously, we should dedicate more energy to the mobile power problem.
The Crimson Dragon
I am setting up a new chain of Opticians to cater for all the people who damage their eyesight while trying to watch tv on their mobile.
I also expect to be recruiting medical staff shortly to cater for all the people who get injured becase they were watching their mobile when they should really have been watching where they were going.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
And I thought the crazy frog ringtone was anoying. Just imagine people watching re-runs of the eurovision song contest while they go to work!
If it's cheap enough to add a phone to your TV for the people who want a phone on their TV, then it's free to you. It'd cost more to make a TV without a phone.
Besides, you may find that there are times you have your TV with you when you didn't expect to need to bring a phone. Now you'll have your phone too with the TV you'd have brought anyway.
The only problem I can really see is the power issue. With the TV alone, you already have to plug in two cords.... now you have to plug in a third for the phone. That's a little inconvenient.
If I sit so close to teh TV I'd get nearsighted.
Well I am, and I suspect that is why most people with bad eyesight are nearsighted more than other.
So whats the trend now? cellsightedness?
Hmmm, the solution: get a cell with a camera on it and view the world thru a small small lcd panel...
-a good strong signal that won't drop calls
-a long battery life
-the ability to survive repeatedly being dropped onto a hard surface from a height of about 5 feet
-waterproofing might be nice
Maybe once I can get all that, I'll be interested in a phone that can deliver TV shows, play Beethoven ring tones, take grainy pictures, and allow me to play simply video games. Honestly, what do these companies think that people buy phones for?
Certainly not a bad service - only problem would be having some odd person on the subway ask to watch with you. All this video-over-widerange-wireless stuff makes me wonder though - what are the long-term limits of wireless data transfer over large areas? I anticipate (article was more early marketing than real info)that users of this service will not be getting a high-resolution image on their cell phone, and what they get will likely jam with any signal interference, but it won't be too long until competition pushes for higher resolution, more video buffer, etc.
Can we expect ultra-high-resolution TV-style instant video eventually for everyone over a cellphone-style wireless network, or will it become more of a video-on-demand system where you chose ahead what you want to watch, then are notified when your show is available to watch? I wonder what the bandwidth will end up making plausible and simpler to provide.
Which makes me think - once people get to commonly learn video-on-demand or TIVO-style interfaces, which will be more popular? If providers can get past the nickel-and-dime mentality of providing shows on demand (see NetFlix for why losing this mentality helps), then I believe that style would be much more popular for people using cellphones who'd want to watch specific shows rather than the usual TV-zombie experience. So long as they can eventually have shows in storage rather than streaming them, it should be easier on the network too.
Ryan Fenton
Japan and Korea are on the bandwagon as well, but it seems like it's just a great way to drain your batteries. Article on mobile TV
I'm curious about how monochrome video would look as opposed to color on such a small screen. Although it seems common enough now for phones to have small color screens, and resolution is not the problem it used to be, might B&W be simply easier on the eyes? Might old movies now have a new niche market? Unfortunately I don't have the spare $ to find out for myself!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
People buy cell phones for the sake of having a mobile telephone. That will never change. The issue is the targeted market. All of these gadgets and gizmos added on to a phone are nothing more than ways for someone to claim their phone is superior to (insert another person)'s phone to some people. To others (gadget fetishists like myself) having a phone that can do fifty other things only marginally well is far "cooler" than fifty-one things that can each fulfill their intended purpose exceptionally well. I'm sure I've left out plenty of other groups, but hitting them all isn't necessary. Everyone wants the ideal phone you've outlined, but since none are avilable (for a reasonable price, to my knowledge, please point me in the correct direction if I'm wrong), well, they go for the shiniest. People like shinies. I'm not saying any of these reasons are logical, but are people usually logical?
£10 for the TV service; but the TV service is being transmitted over the orange 3G network, for which they charge large prices per megabyte of data. Are users of the TV service going to have to pay for the data use as well?
Up here Rogers is planning on offering the same service, although this seems like something that would be much more likely to succeed in Europe rather than North America.
Now why the hell can't they get some reasonable prices for wireless internet?
Great now I have to listen to laugh tracks and sports announcers coming from other people's phones when I ride the train or bus.
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
Why doesnt someone just put a small TV tuner in a phone w/ some extra hardware space (hard to find, I know).
You could just click a button on the side of the phone, and the TV tuner takes over the screen, have a small analog dial on the side for tuning and you'd be set.
Of course, that way it'd be impossible to charge for the service, which I'm sure the phone companies would be none too pleased about.
that's the most clever way I've heard to call someone old-fashioned, and also suggest someone's out-of-touch and maybe superficial. Phone sex might get really weird with this feature, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
In Sweden, the authorita have just recently announced that anybody who owns a tv enabled mobile phone must pay the by law mandated tv license, currently at about $270 a year! (you don't have to pay an extra license if you're already paying for one however). This is regardless of whether one actually watches tv on the thing or not. There is also a law in Sweden requiring the retailer that sold you the phone to report this to the authority in charge of collecting tv license fees: http://www.radiotjanst.se/Other%20languages/OTH_IN FO.htm. It's a free world!
I've been researching displays for a project, and the phone-sized ones are 96x96 pixels. I can't imagine trying to watch video on something that low-rez.
with shit about China. SHUT THE FUCK UP!
Although watching a commuter in a Hummer, his mobile phone to his ear so it blocked his peripheral vision, try to occupy the same spot in the lane as the loaded gravel truck he failed to spot was entertaining ...
I see this as the broadcast television industry attempting to prolong their outmoded form of linear content delivery. I don't want content delivered to me at a corporation's convenience. I want on-demand. I think that by offering this service they are trying to keep people from remembering that they will simply be able to download any content whenever they want before too long. So I can't see a service like this having any legs at all.
Cellphones are quickly changing into mobile PCs and not just phones, we are emerging into an age of information availability that none have ever reached. I just don't understand why people are fighting it.
Because having a powerplant held next to your head is always an iffy proposition. Not to mention because you can't just dictate policy. I think a lot of "energy" (money, really) is already being dedicated to mobile power. Just how are you measuring the urgency on this problem, by the number of posts dedicated on /. ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
While I'm reading too much into /. posts, what exactly is it that you want to be 10' and made of rubber? Sorry, couldn't resist...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
Why not just invent some glasses that has a TV screen for one eye and ear plug for hearing and a wireless phone dial interface. That way you can keep one eye and one ear on the road, while you are driving. How soon before your eyes stay crossed permanently would be the question.
All this video-over-widerange-wireless stuff makes me wonder though - what are the long-term limits of wireless data transfer over large areas? I anticipate (article was more early marketing than real info)that users of this service will not be getting a high-resolution image on their cell phone, and what they get will likely jam with any signal interference, but it won't be too long until competition pushes for higher resolution, more video buffer, etc.
You may have heard of this thing called "satellite television".
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I used to watch b&w TV as a kid. I still watch old films on cable channels. I see really old movies release on DVD now. Ever hear of Charlie Chaplain? His image was used to sell the original IBM PC. What states are you talking about, altered states? God, its bad enough being reminded that I'm getting older.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
I have a hard time accepting that people are actually getting paid more than I am to conceive and implement ideas such as this. Paying serious money ($20/month) for the opportunity to watch a limited number of television shows on a 3-cm square handheld screen.
Every technological innovation goes through several stages:
1) First there is the long hard expensive period of research and development of the basic underlying engineering.
2) Then comes the conceptualizing of a possible product and/or application.
3) Then comes the stage when large amounts of resources are put into making a truly stupid product.
4) Then, the nadir. The point of absolute and total despair where the developers realize that they have spent all this time and effort into making something that is truly stupid, unbelievably expensive, and does nothing more than duplicate the function of a simple, common widely-used device that costs a tiny fraction of the new product.
5) Finally, the phoenix. The price of the new technology falls to the point where its secondary benefits make it worth as much and more than the simple common ordinary device that it is replacing. It then becomes the new simple, common ordinary way of doing a task.
This is seen over and over. The word processor replacing the typewriter. Steven Levy in Hackers writes of the despair of the guy who invented the word processor when he realized that he was using a $20000 minicomputer to duplicate the function of a $20 typewriter. Word processors started to make sense when minicomputers started to cost $2. The CD replacing the vinyl phonograph, the energy saver light bulb, the music synthesizer, the television infra-red remote, the list goes on and on. It's a process.
These guys are at the point where they have invested a ton of money to make a truly stupid product but haven't realized it yet. Let's all hope that they survive the coming crash. Yes, guys, you actually did spend millions on the idea that people would give you money to watch a inch-square TV in a television picture on their cell phone. But, cheer up! It's not the end of the world and eventually something really wonderful will come directly from it.
Someday.
-Good sound (perhaps a flip, so you can hear something and people hear you talking as well? it's like most cell makers believe your mouth is an inch away from your ears)
-Decently sized (not too small nor too big)
-Useable keyboard (for people with big fingers, or those with hand numbness/tingling)
-A screen you can read in most lighting conditions
-Conservative look
-Decently priced
If anything more I'd wish for a vibrating ringer as an option (for during meetings and such).
Not some convergence-of-gadgets toy that crashes, takes forever to boot, sounds like crap, drops calls and eats thru batteries. I suppose 12 year olds don't have anything better to do than search through thousands of ringtones, play games on their phones and such, but I really don't care about such features.
///<sig
You're not married, Harmony, are you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
Your TV Phones YOU!
$10 UK to access the channels.
$0.5 UK/minute to watch the show.
If they didn't do it then it would be tantamount to saying that a full month of constant connection to someone else costs them *at most* $10 UK which would make the rest of their pricing policies seem all the more outrageous in comparison. You can't be to obvious about how you grift people - if you want to squeeze blood from a stone you gotta squeeze *slowly*.
This is the sort of 'convergence' technology that I'll never, ever understand. It's like once a piece of technology becomes mature, we rewind time to when it was an inconvenient pain in the ass.
Land lines have high-reliability, high-quality, low per-call cost... and what does everyone move to? Cell phones, which sound like everyone's stuck under six feet of molasses, crap out on every third call, and have impenetrable service agreements in which the only certainty is that you'll be told you "don't understand pro-ration", and then fucked over.
Even small, non-SLR digital cameras can take pictures that rival the quality of film snapshots and, sometimes, 35mm film (film fetishists, this isn't the main point I'm making, so suck it up and go away)---and what do we get? Tiny, grainy cell-phone cameras that look just like handheld digital cameras did five years ago. Damn it, when I get my amateur porn off livejournal, I want it to be high-quality.
And now we're getting nice, shiny HDTV transmission, but folks're going to want it on one-inch fuzzy cell phone screens. Sheesh!
Yeah, I know everyone moves to these things voluntarily, but I still loathe them, especially since it was so hard for me to get a cell phone which was "just a fucking phone". And the big button in the middle goes to some kind of pay service I will never, ever, ever want to access, instead of something useful like the phone book.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
especially for users of the female persuasion, this is a good feature. Oh, the DIY project possibilities for rubberized, waterproof, portable electronics!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
The sad part is that I have no doubt another company will be pushing "HDTV-cellular" within a year. 1080i on a 96x96px screen anyone?
Seriously, I've no intention of watching TV on my phone, but is this going to turn into a format war? 1080i vs 720p is bad enough, but now will we get competing standards like 96p, 240i, etc, for all the various models?
But what if they added a TV out capability to one of those phones. That in essence would give you cable where you want it and when you want it. Basically a replacement for a cable box and when you're in the middle of a show and you need to go somewhere, just pick up your phone from the cradle and continue watching it on the road.
Although I believe that it won't happen with the wireless dataspeeds or number of channels we have right now, but I could see something like this happening in a couple of years. _Then_ I might be interested in the service, not before that.
I don't want a phone with a camera, video games, multiple ring tones. All that I really find useful is a phone that acts like a phone. Why can't people simply be content with making phone calls on their cellular phones?
Plus, this feature will just add to the distraction that's already caused by cell phones. So now not only do we have to deal with cell phones going off during class/meetings/movies/etc but we also have to deal with people watching television? Lots of people seem to have very little self control as it is. Do we really need to be encouraging these people. For example, what makes you think that those people who actually answer their phones during a movie wouldn't use the TV feature at inappropriate times?
Sure, I'll be the first to admit that this feature is cool, and I love gadgets, but it isn't really useful for anything. Why can't people buy a portable television instead of an overpriced cell phone? Anyway, just my two cents.
We're back to the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none situation here.
With the amount of new technology and features in phones today, their original purpose is becoming less and less efficient.
For example: on my old Nokia 3310, I pushed the 'Down' button until I found the person I wanted to call, then I pressed the 'Phone' button and it dialled the number. No difficulties there.
On my new, all-singing-all-dancing Samsung monstrosity, I must press the 'Menu' button, whisk past 'Camera' and 'Applications' to find 'Phone Book', press 'OK', scroll down to the person I want to phone, press 'OK' again, select the number, then press 'Phone'.
I can grasp that some people want to be able to snap pictures at ridiculously low resolutions, send those unintelligable photos to their friends, watch videos while on the bus, etc etc etc... Now, in this technologically oriented world, we are inundated with devices that do one job supremely well -- I have an iPod for music, a PDA for organisation.. Why is finding a phone that just phones such a difficulty?
An employee suggested to me that we load Television on a few offices here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using it for our employee's day-to-day channel surfing. So I decided to let him install the TV into 5 offices to see how the users got on. Besides, our IT manager had been using one in his office and it seemed to work fine, why not try it on the client offices?
Once he'd got the machines up and running with TV we let the users try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: TV was a pretty good replacement for radio and the users could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from users who could not find things they were used to or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with the radio. The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when TV suddenly had an error reading from our intranet site and corrupted his project.
Needless to say, the Television team offered no support whatsoever. I made the employee remove Television from the machines and lets just say he's not with us anymore.
I don't think the viewer will be in the driving seat. It's too good an opportunity for them to throw away.
Let's see, you get to control my mind and I pay you for it. This is an extention of the newspapers and I'm fine with that if you guys promise me if you get a TV mobile, to be critical of yourselves when watching.
I don't have a TV.
Think people, think!
A blog I run for the wealth
I always ask the question, been asking for a couple years now, and no one can give a good answer. Do people really need to be staring at a TeeVee screen every waking moment?
Why implement an old way to watch TV on new technology?
Why not instead offer a video on demand service? Where you can pause whatever you are watching, and pick it up whenever you want? I'm envisioning something like TiVo for your cell phone, but the content would be stored on the server side.
Or how about offering a service to compete with satelite radio. Seems to me if they can deliver video, they should be able to deliver audio at the same quality level of satelite or higher. Plus they will have the advantage of two way communication. I think once the cell phone industry figures this out, the satelite radio companies will be in BIG trouble.
How does the ability to download and play a multi-media application effect your battery time if you don't download it and play it? Perhaps the improved screen resoloution the phones will be featuring targeted at consumers of the application will require more power?
I signed up with Cingular recently after some issues with Verizon and Sprint. They were offering a free MobiTV (or something like that) demo for 10 days with no charge, so I figured why not?
...and this was with EDGE on a Motorola V3 Razr.
...anyways, my point being, with mobile TV, they'll probably bill you for a monthly service, as well as a per-view premium for certain shows, and charge you for the data transfer it took to get it in the first place. The pricing scheme's almost assuredly going to suck. That's just what cell phone companies do - all of them.
That wasn't TV.
What I got was a grainy slideshow that updated once every 5 seconds or so with terribly low-quality audio, all played through an application with no volume control (with a very loud default volume) and a terrible interface.
The mobile TV thing seems like it could be marginally useful, once in a while. Like if I have 20 minutes to kill, waiting in a doctor's office or something, I wouldn't mind downloading an Episode of Family Guy or something.
What I worry about are pricing structures. I already got screwed by Cingular with $80 worth of mobile IM charges because, for some stupid reason, mobile IM is considered text messaging and not internet usage (which I was paying $25/month for unlimited data transfer for). I've already noticed I've been billed for data transfer for using their Media Mall, which is nothing but a phone-friendly store for Cingular to sell ringtones, games, wallpapers, etc. I mean, I downloaded Chessmaster, and paid $5 for it, and then they charged me for the privelage of using their godawful web interface just so I could buy their game, too. It'd be like Blockbuster Video charging cover at the door.
Here in Oxfordshire we have a low power FTA analogue channel just for Oxford and surrounding areas. It shows Sky news free (and it's not worth that much in my opinion) old films and ancient TV programmes, and a few locally made programmes. I don't know if there are any others in the UK.
I already see men using electric shavers, women putting on makeup using their rear view mirror, people cocking their head 45 degrees to the side with their cells (if you're holding it, why do you need to cock your head like you're cradling a home phone handset and using both hands for other things when you're not???) and of course the usual wanna-be g-whizzes leaning so far to their right that they're practically laying across the passenger seat (probably due to excessive bling-bling dragging them down by way of gravity). Bleah.
Now this. Years ago I started saying that the FCC wanted to free up spectrum so people could have high speed wireless services advanced beyond what we have now and for no better reason really than full motion streaming video on their cell phones. I was not very far off it would seem and can see this coming here. Of course, Sprint already has video-over-cell, albiet not very useable.
So now we can have no-handed driving while people watch video pr0n on their handsets, network access clogged as people use up the availible spectrum and bandwidth with watching reruns of Survivor, and every other permutation relating to this usage.
Meanwhile, various state governments can't get together on defining what adequately hands-free usage is, regulating standard voice cell usage while driving for the public safety's sake, and we add this. Since some of the abusers are state legislators here, I can only imagine them driving into the state capitol watching the rushes of their campaign video tapings as they careen wildly back and forth across the highway while also trying to shove an arm into a suit jacket and shave off their five o'clock shadow.
Stop the world, I want to get off.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I just wish Orange would spend less on crap cinema adverts and TV and more on getting their cell coverage right which, at the moment, is crap.
Personally, the mobile providers, at least in the UK, are overpriced rip-off merchants - the sooner we go fully VoIP and say bye bye to the cellular providers, the better as far as I am concerned...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I anticipate (article was more early marketing than real info)that users of this service will not be getting a high-resolution image on their cell phone
Well, yeah, almost certainly not. But that's more about the number of pixels in a cell phone screen, not about bandwidth. Verizon's 3G service has "typical speeds of 400-700 kbps". That's more than enough for the kind of resolution you get on a cell phone.
Can we expect ultra-high-resolution TV-style instant video eventually for everyone over a cellphone-style wireless network, or will it become more of a video-on-demand system where you chose ahead what you want to watch, then are notified when your show is available to watch? I wonder what the bandwidth will end up making plausible and simpler to provide.
Well, remember, if you have enough "towers", bandwidth is essentially unlimited. Of course, whether or not you still consider that "cellphone-style" is a matter of semantics. It'd really be more "wifi-style" if we need that many "towers".
Which makes me think - once people get to commonly learn video-on-demand or TIVO-style interfaces, which will be more popular?
I think there's a place for both, actually. Obviously on-demand is more convenient, but there's a place for a television series where everyone is watching at roughly the same time. People don't just watch the show for the content of the show, it's also something that we can talk about at work or school or whatever. And then of course there are live shows, including sporting events and news, but many "reality TV" shows have live events as well.
How far away from an actual TV can you be?
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
If this service reaches the US, given how many vehicle accidents are caused by morons talking on their cell phones, imagine what's going to happen when they try to watch tv on their cellphone and drive at the same time.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
What's the point. TV is dead, or rapidly dying. The broadcast paradigm is totally 20th Century. I don't have a TV, so why would I want this? To watch the low IQ drivel that the little stupid people watch? No thanks. Just give ma phone that actually works as a phone, can stay connected for more than 20 seconds and doesn't gobble up power like a 1Kw electric heater.
I can't wait to see all the zombies on the bus now!
How much will it cost?
Well, how much are you able to borrow?
from a samsung pr release last year
Samsung mass producing 2 inch SLS-LCD's
Mar 30 2004 - 01:30 PM ET | Samsung
Samsung announced that it is now mass producing 2 inch SLS-LCD displays meant for mobile devices. It has a high resolution of 200 pixels per inch and delivers a resolution of at least 250:1.
should be nice and clear, and remember it (technology) can only get better !
Even if this is an option, cell phone providers have a way of raising everyone's fees by, say, $5 a month, instead of charging individual users who want the service $20 a month extra, and giving everyone access to this new service. Then, they can push advertising and other junk to your phone.
It's annoying when you're having dinner and some idiot calls you, and it's a telemarketer or the wrong number or something. Worse is when you're making some dangerous traffic maneuver while driving and the same happens. This can cause accidents, injuries, deaths, or worse...
I think they need to make the cell phone do what a phone is supposed to do.
I'm in Silicon Valley, where, surprisingly, cell phone coverage sucks. In the expensive neighborhoods, residents bitch about cell towers, so coverage is lousy. There are many big trees, so PCS frequencies are attenuated. Stanford University only allows one cell phone vendor on campus (Cingular) so they can add their own fees. And coverage in the hills west of I-280 is spotty.
I'd rather have decent voice coverage than tiny-screen video.
3G data transmission speeds are about 300kbit/sec. With mpeg-4 encoding and a relatively tiny number of pixels (we're only talking about 176x144 resolution on a 5cm screen) that's pretty decent quality and you can get 15-30 frames a second without any problems so long as the processor on the phone can deal with the stream. However, you're still stuck with a vanishingly small screen and a tiny speaker that makes the audio sound awful, even if it's encoded at a decent bitrate. Would I watch a movie in that environment? Probably not. But I'd tune in to news or catch sports scores if I was sitting around in an airport or a riding on a train. Don't forget that 3G radios suck batteries dry a LOT faster and having the phone's tiny processor running flat out to keep up with decoding a video stream will likely make battery life even worse...so don't throw away your cableTV box just yet. 8-)
I saw TV on a telephone 20 years ago.
I think it was a Curtis Mathes.
Posted to to show prior art to any relevant patent applications, and because I think it's funny.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Does anyone have any info on if this will be subject the the TV tax?
The tax is supposed to be for "a TV or any other device to receive or record TV programmes" and runs "colour TV Licence costs £126.50 and a black and white licence costs £42.00."
(above courtesy of www.tvlicensing.co.uk)
...moving very slowly and winning footraces with smug satisfaction.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Well, remember, if you have enough "towers", bandwidth is essentially unlimited.
Uhhhh... not really. Turn in your geek card. You failed to take advantage of this opportunity to apply the Nyquist Sampling theorem. I suggest you read books on Fourier Analysis and Information theory before spouting off such nonsense.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I thought it said "Phone on your television" and I was like... they already have that, except the people on the TV have a little trouble hearing me unless I yell at them. Even then they sometimes ignore me.
this isn't news. the israeli branch of Orange, and several other israeli cellphone network companies have already been offering a similar service for a few months now.
I can't even pay $10 just to get it on my TV. Why can't we get a la carte service like this over the internet, or the TV, but it's available for phones?
I just hope that nobody will attempt to use this feature while driving.
INACTIVE ACCOUNT
Information theory is going to tell you that the bandwidth through a single channel is limited. But if you have enough towers, then you can dedicate a nearly unlimited number of channels to every single user. Yes, there is still I suppose a theoretical limit, but it's nowhere near anything that we're currently seeing.
"I just want a simple phone without net access" people, doing on slashdot?
On the other hand, don't let yourself be fleeced by greedy companies. TV sounds dumb, use them as wireless ISP instead. They don't want that because they want to be "special" so they can charge "special".
Keep jumping ship to the provider that has the lowest net access and create those "special" services with your own software on your phone. Java MIDP 2.0, Linux or Symbian. I'm talking about Europe.
At least that's my advice.
- -- Truth addict for life.
But if you have enough towers, then you can dedicate a nearly unlimited number of channels to every single user.
/. post, but take it from me: the difference in entropy makes a difference of orders of magnitude.
No, you can't. Bandwidth has nothing to do with the number of towers. The modern use of the term bandwidth are a consequence of Claude Shannon's work in information theory. Before Shannon proved the Nyquist Sampling theorem, bandwidth referred only to particular regions in the electromagnetic spectrum. The Nyquist Sampling theorem justified the intuition that a large swath of the spectrum could carry more information than a small one, and in fact gives an upper bound on how much information a channel can carry in terms of its bandwidth.
Now consider what happens in the physical case of two towers broadcasting distinct signals on the same band -- we can think of each signal as a channel. Note that this would be required for your scheme to work. For simplicity, assume that they are broadcasting omnidirectionally. Fourier analysis (and experimental evidence) assure us that the signals are going to interfere with each other. The point being that unless you figure out some way to keep the two signals from interfering with each other, what you think are two channels are in fact one very noisy channel. This is possible (using special antennae and the like) but very difficult in practice.
Since there isn't much spectrum left to be used anyway, your suggestion just can't work. Note that under these conditions, a wired solution would provide far more bandwidth. Interference between cables is negligible, so each cable could be considered a distinct channel. So even if a single cable provides less bandwidth than the airwaves, we can connect two nodes with multiple channels. There is still a theoretical limit to my suggestion, since there will still be intra-cable interference. An analysis of communication across noisy channels is a beyond the scope of a
After all, I am strangely colored.
This isn't really new... They've been doing this in Japan for years!
Bandwidth has nothing to do with the number of towers.
So if there was only one cell phone tower in the world, and everyone in the world had to share the same frequencies on that one cell phone tower, we'd still have the same bandwidth available?
Now consider what happens in the physical case of two towers broadcasting distinct signals on the same band -- we can think of each signal as a channel. Note that this would be required for your scheme to work. For simplicity, assume that they are broadcasting omnidirectionally.
Your simplification greatly reduces the usefulness of having multiple towers.
Fourier analysis (and experimental evidence) assure us that the signals are going to interfere with each other.
Sure, to some very very small extent, which drops off as the square of the distance from the tower. IOW, yes, a cell phone tower in Mexico interferes with a cell phone tower in New York City, but the interference is negligible. Now, reduce the wattage outputted by the tower, and move them closer together, and you get the same neglible interference.
You seem to be making the assumption that we'd increase the number of towers without also decreasing the power those towers are transmitting at. Well yeah, that obviously wouldn't work. But if you increase the number of towers and also decrease the ouput power of each tower, you can serve a lot more users at the same time. The individual bandwidth available to any particular user might not increase, but the total bandwidth certainly does.
We've been able to record TV shows using TV Tuner cards for at least 10 years now. Now that we've got high speed wifi in public places, can't we just rebroadcast our pre-recorded TV shows to ourselves for free? Why does this need to be resold to us as a service? Oh yeah, with new HDTV, now are tuner cards are broken and we can't record shows without permission anymore ... I forgot. Things sure are getting easier and more fun. Where do I want to go today, Bill? How about 1999?
Ok, TV on a mobile is (marginally) cool.
For $20 (ish) a month? I hope that commercials are removed. For $30 I can buy a battery powered TV that can catch regular broadcasts. A little more for LCD and pocket size.
Also... I get charged for text messaging on my mobile. Email on my mobile. "They" are kind enough to give me 100 minutes a month, and unlimited weekends talking, but the low-volume data is ALWAYS charged for.
I guess the telcos view TALK services the "loss leader" and try to make up the difference with other (specious) services.
If only I had some control on the process. But, the phones are "locked" to a service provider, who can then decide exactly what to offer.
As a for instance -- AT&T recently REMOVED the ability to do voice and data at the same time.
So, with the AT&T network, you can watch TV on your phone (I can send the data to my phone, and it can decode it), but I can't use it as a phone anymore (at least not while the TV is running).
Kind of defeats the purpose (and, it would be screamingly expensive for me do that). Of course, the provider in question could be more liberal; but I doubt it.
Anyone have experience with the provider?
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
"Televisions are getting smaller and smaller, and bigger and bigger. Soon the market for the medium sized tv will disappear."
http://notanumber.net/
Even if the quality is good this will fail. TV is too absorbing to do outside of the house... Think about it. Are there a lot of Protable DVD players? Or people watching their own movies in laptops, PocketPCs, PSPs, etc? What about those small TVs that are dirt cheap and have been around for years? I don't see them around. The only two places that a small screen is acceptable are planes and back seat of cars... And you have to be a kid to do the latter.
Just for the record, TV on mobile phones has been available where I live for near a year now. Here in Japan you can pick up a phone from Vodafone (formally J-Phone) that receives standard broadcast TV. Granted concerns about eyestrain and sound quality are valid, but this is not new. Regarding the ganking people are getting on the fees....well THAT is another issue entirely UK-side.
Watching TV is not all though, you can also cable it directly to your TV and view the pictures you have saved or...and a big one here...sing KARAOKE.
Truth is 9 times out of 10 if it comes out somewhere on a phone...it was out in Japan last year. Gageteer test market, bar-none. (Note my phone currently has neither TV nor camera and is about the size of a mid-size matchbox)
....include the playboy channel?