Simon’s Blog

Think about it. Would you want to be interested in being able to watch television on your mobile phone when you’re on the move: say if you’re on a boring bus or train journey; or if you’re killing time waiting for a plane? It might be nice to have the option, don’t you think? It turns out that, in a survey of 1500 entertainment consumers, around 30% of people said they would be interested watching TV on their cell phone. I think that’s a pretty high percentage, given that most people haven’t yet experienced or thought about just how good the experience could be.

Which makes it baffling to me that the Guardian newspaper in the UK today concludes from this survey that - TV on mobiles proves a turn-off. Ho hum…

But no matter: it’s pretty clear. TV and video on mobiles is going to be huge (as are all forms of media). All of which brings us to an interesting question: which technologies are going to be important in enabling TV on mobiles to be a compelling experience?

Most people think this is all about something called “DVB-H” - a TV broadcast system that, as you might guess from its name (Digital Video Broadcast - Handheld) is designed for use in mobile phones and other devices. Nokia have announced support for DVB-H in their latest handset, and mobile network operators and TV operators are starting to do content deals. That’s great… except there isn’t really much around in the way of DVB-H networks to broadcast this content (hence, in the recent deal between Vodafone and News Corp [Sky], programming will be made available over Vodafone’s 3G network).

However, there are plenty of what are known as “DVB-T” networks around in many parts of the world. DVB-T is “Digital Video Broadcast - Terrestrial Television”. It’s a terrestrial digital TV broadcast system designed to provide services into people’s homes. This technology is used, for example to provide a service called Freeview in the UK. This provides digital free-to-air television.

So, why couldn’t the mobile phone companies build DVB-T into their handsets? Well, it’s because DVB-T doesn’t really work well when you’re on the move. So that means the idea of mobile phones being able to pick up DVB-T broadcasts is dead, right? Wrong. This is a technology problem. A technology problem for which there’s a solution. It’s called “antenna diversity“.

What’s really exciting, then, is that not only could mobile handsets in the future be able to show digital TV, live. But they could show lots of great free content, too. In the UK, a mobile handset supporting DVB-T could – right now - show nearly forty free-to-air channels.