Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 19 June 2007 16:58
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Mobile TV services launched or trialled to date have all been in delivered to cellphones in conjunction with cellular operators, but a potentially attractive alternative would be a combined iPod and mobile TV receiver.
Qualcomm's MediaFlo technology is one of several mobile TV technologies vying for market acceptance and is already at the stage of large scale commercial deployment. In the US Qualcomm has build a nationwide MediaFlo network and is providing a complete wholesale mobile TV service: it owns all the relationships with content providers and is responsible for the end-to-end service.
The two largest cellular networks in the US - Verizon and AT&T have contracted to resell the service. Verizon has already
launched its version, in March, and AT&T (which will be the first operator to sell the Apple iPhone) will launch earlier this year Samsung and LG are supplying the handsets able to receive the MediaFlo broadcasts.
Video content available on cellphones to date in Australia and almost everywhere else is 'unicast' that is each user has a dedicated data stream over the cellular network. This ties up scarce capacity in the network. MediaFlo and its main rival DVB-H use entirely separate networks and frequencies to broadcast, or multicast, the same video signal to multiple cellular handsets which have additional functionality to enable them to receive and decode these signals.
MediaFlo can deliver multiple channels of real-time video, datacast channels of information such as news, weather, sports results and stock market data and 'clipcasts' short videos which are downloaded in background and stored on the handset for viewing at a time of the user's choosing.
