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."

Comments

Re:Why?

[LostCluster]

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.

Just because it's Qualcomm...

[Zigurd]

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.

Re:Why not?

[girlintraining]

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.