Any closer to cell phone TV?
Broadcasters, and the people who follow them, are gathered in Las Vegas for the spring NAB Show. The industry is desperately looking for the “next big thing” due to the fact that new generations of TV and radio watchers/listeners are going elsewhere for their entertainment.
One new frontier: cell phone broadcasting. Problem is — just like the Betamax/VHS wars of yesteryear there are two major competiting formats for “broadcasting” television feeds over cell phones.
One format, Open Mobile Video Coalition’s MPH, is receiving lots of press at the moment. National and local broadcasters are embracing the format and are about to go live in a number of big cities including Washington, D.C. The coalition is composed of U.S. commercial and public broadcasters.
The other major format, Qualcomm’s Media-FLO has the backing of AT&T and Verizon and streams a bunch of cable-TV channel favorites but has yet to make a dent in providing network/local TV station cellphone video.
The solution could be a scenerio like XM and Sirius joining forces — but don’t count on it at least in the very near future.
Back to NAB. Rumors have it that there will be a number of MPH devices announced at the show including handsets, netbooks and even solutions for watching TV in your car.
Nice site, Dr. Krakow.