Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
Free market forces are dictated by those who spend the most money on the service.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
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
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?
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?
I studied related stuff for my thesis and found out an interesting bit of info.
One of the main reasons for big third generation mobile services markets in Japan and Korea are the lengthy daily commutes people do in trains.
And normally, in trains, you can charge your phone (there is AC or DC available). Thus, power consumption is not a problem when you take into account the environment where these 3G services are used.
Same thing for me here in Finland. I use my phone to surf the net during my 3 hours of daily commuting on a train. I decided pretty quickly against carrying a 6 pound computer with me the whole day just to be able to surf the net. Now I use just my Nokia 6600 to read PDA version of slashdot. Some of my commuting friends use a Nokia 9300 for the same purpose and yes, they use it to watch TV shows too.
"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.