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Bringing Free Television To Phones In America
ideonexus writes "South Korea, China, Brazil, parts of Europe, and Japan have been watching television on their phones for free since 2005, but American mobile carriers are struggling to offer clunky streaming video using Qualcomm's proprietary MediaFLO system for an additional monthly fee and excessive bandwidth demands. Now, with America having gone digital in June, if Mobile carriers were to have ATSC M/H (advanced television systems committee — mobile/handheld) television-tuner chips built into their handsets it sounds like we could enjoy free TV on our cell phones too; however, these companies have already invested a great deal of money adapting their networks to Qualcomm's format and Qualcomm is considering becoming a mobile television distributor itself."
Let's see... as non-cellphone devices, FLO TV costs $250 for the 7-inch LCD TV at Best Buy, and then you get 6 months free after which you pay about $15/month.
An ATSC-based portable LCD of the same size costs $100 at Best Buy, and of course has no monthly fees because ATSC is broadcast in the clear.
Now, the FLO TV product has an advantage because what you're paying for isn't just the broadcast networks, but also a few "basic cable" channels such as ESPN, CNN, CNBC, Nick, and Comedy Central. It's a case of you get what you pay for.
The places where this has worked have high population density and less personal space. A teenager can watch TV in their room without disturbing their parents. People can watch TV on public transport. That kind of thing. It is less attractive in countries with low population densities.
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Okay, not quite a tilt, but the pinball machine is being rocked quite a bit to get that comparison.
Plasma TVs are practically having a going out of business sale lately because California set energy standards for TVs at just below what plasma can do. As usually happens, when California regulates something, national distributors want one product they can take everywhere so the regulation becomes a de facto national standard.
MediaFLO isn't "clunky." The FLO part stands for "Forward Link Only." That means it uses a broadcast channel downstream, so it is bandwidth-efficient for one-way content delivery. It is a Qualcomm proprietary technology, but it is not inherently less good than other DTV technologies applicable to mobile devices. MediaFLO was designed for mobile devices, so it might have advantages over some DTV standards that were not designed with mobile devices in mind.
I wrote parts of this stuff
A mobile phone, bought without a contract, is often upwards of a few hundred dollars here in America.
Not with TracFone or Virgin.
decoding the broadcast ATSC signal takes a rather beefy CPU, so I wonder if decoding it (even in hardware) might not consume a lot of power for a cellphone.
Mobile reception of ATSC signals is difficult because of the larger antenna size required and because phase shifting of the signal and such can corrupt it, even at vehicle speeds. The only solution that makes sense is multicast OTA by the mobile provider. 288x352 @ 25 FPS, with a mono 22Khz audio can be reproduced at a decent quality at maybe 100KB/s, so 20 channels of broadcast TV on a mobile link would consume maybe 2MB/s, which is relatively low.
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In America, boradband providers only offer additional services if they can charge you for it. This "free" word you speak of will not be recognized by the American cell providers.
But it's not their call. If I buy a nokia ATSC enabled phone, and I tune to a local HD channel, I'll get television. Unless I buy the phone from a cell company who removes that functionality and renables it for a monthly fee, there's nothing they can do about it.
That is because mobile phones are one of the few things (along with healthcare) where Americans get a raw deal compared to the rest of the world.
Most things (rent, food, gadgets) are cheaper in the USA but it seems phones and healthcare are not.
The UK normally is an expensive country (gadgets cost twice the US price) but you can get a "pay as you go" phone (no contract) for £8.97 which is $14 - including tax and delivery.
So you can see why teenagers just throw one into the river and get a new one without thinking much about it.
God knows why phones are more expensive and so lacking in features over there in the USA - the healthcare is less of a mystery (from conversations I have had, USians are happy that their health care is overly expensive as long as that means that immigrants don't get treated).
I've heard enough from the peanut gallery now... The non-stop bickering about trivialities is getting pretty damn old, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. Here's a lolipop, go away little children, and let the adults talk.
Is Europe, DVB-H had been promoted for literally decades as the thing that was going to change the world... EVERYTHING was going to have a TV on it, cell phones most of all.
Fast forward to the modern day, with cell phone manufacturers having disputes with broadcasters over DVB-H fees, one just went ahead and built a full DVB-T receiver into their cell phones. It was a stunning development. Sure, it used a bit more power, but now you could watch REAL TV programs, not just the niche "mobile" broadcasts that you were supposed to want to watch on your cell phone. Of course broadcasters were put in their place by this move, and DVB-H fees have become more reasonable, and there's an effort to get real content out there. But either way, the proverbial cat is out of the bag, and people now want "real TV" on their cell phones, and a large number of them get just that these days, for a fairly small premium...
Of course ATSC in the US is much more complex than DVB-T in Europe, but never the less, you certainly can still find a handheld TV for under $100 http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/541548/Digital-Prism-ATSC-300-3-5/
So, it's only a question of time. Give it another year, and your smart phones will receive OTA broadcasts, for free. Sure, they might also support the premium in-network TV-like data system, but nobody will want it, and the niche audience won't be large enough to support the effort. And it'll go the way of the MPEG-1 D-Frames, and the "PDA Internet", as do all poorly thought-out kludges that are only stop-gaps for temporarily resource-starved platforms that can't yet play with the big boys.
That is all. You may now return to your endless and pointless bickering about whether or not it's worthwhile to buy a subsidized cell phone...
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