NTL and o2 announce TV to Mobile trial details
NTL and O2 today revealed what content they will be using in their TV to mobile trial in Oxford. Available will be The Cartoon Network, CNN, Discovery Channel, Sky Sports News and Sky Travel. Overall 16 channels in all will be available.
The six-month trial will use the DVB-H broadcast transmission standard, specially designed for handheld reception. DVB-H uses a technology called “time slicing” to allow up to eight hours of TV to be watched on one battery charge. Time slicing only sends the information needed for the one channel of content which is being watched, which means less power is used.
The DVB-H standard is also being tested in by the US, Germany, France, Finland and in Sweden . More trials expected to launch later in 2005 and throughout 2006.
But DVB-H is in competition with another mobile TV technology called Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB). The Japanese, South Koreans and Ericsson of Sweden back DMB because they say the technology drain batteries even less and it handles more frames a second.
O2 will soon begin the process of recruiting triallists and all 350 triallists will be given a 7710 which, for the purposes of the trial, will come with a special DVB-H receiver.
Mobile companies are expected to have about 51 million users of mobile TV by 2009, making an estimated $6.6bn (£3.5bn) in revenue, according to technology US consultancy Strategy Analytics.
It will be interesting to see the results of the trial. My personal view is that for the TV to mobile service to be of maximum value, there needs to be some kind of PVR/on-demand feature. Mobile users aren’t going to spend hours and hours watching TV on their mobiles as more than likely they will only watch when they are ‘on the move’. Hence, I believe that in the 30-60 mins that they are travelling they are not going to just tune into whatever happens to be broadcasting at that point in time - they will want to watch something that matches their tastes and the only way to acheive this is to have content ‘On-demand’ or already stored on their handset.
More on this topic: Tech Digest
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