Telecom New Zealand has launched mobile television (see below), which will be free for both prepaid and postpaid customers through the end of November, according to Telecommunications Review. The service’s cost in New Zealand after the trial period ends hasn’t been announced.
ESPN has become a mobile information powerhouse, including transmitting some 63 million mobile alerts every month and receiving more than nine million unique viewers on its mobile Web site (see below), whose traffic is increasing 78 percent annually, according to FierceMobileContent.
Smartphones are responsible for [...]
SPB Software is offering two mobile television services, SPB TV — without a monthly subscription fee — for Android phones, the company says.
One service, which requires buying a $9.95 application, offers more than 100 mobile TV channels [...]
Technology expert/blogger and gdgt co-founder Peter Rojas says “a very reliable source” tells him Qualcomm will be launching a mobile television device called “FLO TV Personal Television” or “PTV.”
According to the source, Qualcomm will [...]
BBC News writes glumly about the Telegent Systems/In-Stat analog mobile television report, which I discussed a few days ago, but quotes an analyst who has some encouraging words at the end of the article about free mobile TV.
The article’s headline is “Mobile TV ‘very slow’ to take off,” referring [...]
The Sky Mobile TV service on Vodafone’s 3G network in New Zealand (see above) has lost subscribers this year, from 8,427 on June 30, 2008 to 7,800 on June 30, 2009, according to Rapid TV News.
[...]Muscovites should be able to watch mobile television by the end of this year, based on approvals by the government, reports Broadband TV News (based on an article in Kommersant).
The article says Russia’s State Commission for Radio Frequencies has approved the cellular subsidiaries of three companies — Sistema, [...]
Qualcomm, developer of its FLO TV mobile television service has teamed with Rentrak to create mobile TV’s “first comprehensive viewership and advertising impression reporting,” according to the press release.
FLO TV will use this new service measurement service, Rentrak’s TV Essentials, to provide information to content providers and potential [...]
Telegent Systems and In-Stat forecast some 54 million analog mobile television-enabled cellular phones this year and 300 million analog mobile TV users in 2013 (see below), according the press release and free downloadable white paper.
O2 in Ireland has launched 3G mobile television services (see below) with two monthly packages — “O2 Lifestyle Pack” for five euros ($7.16) per month and “Sky Sports & News Pack” for 6 euros ($8.59) per month — plus a daily rate (24 hours) to watch one service for one euro ($1.43).
Infonetics Research forecasts that 397 million cellular video phones, creating a market worth tens of billions of dollars, will be sold in 2013 (see below). At the end of 2008 there were 41 million video phone subscribers, and that number will increase almost ten times by 2013, the [...]
The Macedonian cellular operator Cosmofon has launched a 3G-based mobile television service, “live TV” (see below), according to TeleGeography.
Based on the article and the “live TV” Web site, Cosmofon is offering four television channels: A1 [...]
BlockBuster today said it would offer thousands of movies from its OnDemand service (see below) for rental or purchase on certain Motorola cellular phones.
Software will be bundled with Motorola handsets. However, the announcement provided almost no specifics, such as the phone models, [...]
LIN TV in conjunction with Capitol Broadcasting’s News Over Wireless is offering mobile TV software for BlackBerry phones, LIN says (pdf file).
LIN operates 27 television stations and released BlackBerry software on August 7 that was customized for six of the stations: WISH, WAVY, KRQE, WANE, WALA and [...]
I’ve returned from a hectic but fascinating trip of India with Nokia, as I previously noted, to learn about cellular phone software for agriculture, textile and educational applications. I traveled with Nokia employees to several locations around the country to speak with an Indian farmer, textile agent, [...]
Two telecommunications companies in Indonesia have begun testing mobile television programs in some area of Jakarta, according to the Jakarta Globe.
PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia and PT Indosat are transmitting several mobile TV programs in central and southern Jakarta. Additional areas are slated to receive coverage in August, the article says.
So far, the [...]
Sony Ericsson has posted a mobile television program, “Pocket TV,” (see above) to YouTube in the U.K. and it appears to be generating a significant number of viewers, according to Tech Radar.
The show, which features a moderator in his underwear [...]
MobiTV is looking to expand into new overseas markets, including licensing its technology rather than only aggregating mobile television programs, according to mocoNews.net’s article in The Washington Post.
Based on a Total Telecom magazine interview with Ray de Renzo, chief marketing officer for MobiTV, de Renzo says overseas companies [...]
TeleAnalytics’ Mobile TV Tracking Service’s forecasts (pdf file) 80.8 million – 81.9 million mobile television users by the end of 2009.
The research firm says, “Despite the financial crisis, mobile TV device sales will at worst remain flat, but [...]
The ATSC Mobile TV protocol, promoted by members of the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC), will be tested in seven Washington, D.C. television stations and additional stations in at least five other cities through this August, according to Broadcasting & Cable.
Anne Schelle, executive director of the OMVC, says in [...]
Michael Jackson’s memorial service on Tuesday (see below) generated not only huge online audiences but also huge mobile television audiences, says Wireless Week.
Qualcomm’s FLO TV says viewership increased more than 80 percent compared to the previous [...]
If you’re a fan of the “Big Brother” television show on CBS (I am definitely not), you can get a multitude of multimedia tie-ins, including SMS interactivity and mobile television, according to InteractiveTV Today.
For mobile TV, “Big Brother” is transmitted over Qualcomm’s FLO TV, which is available [...]
Reuters headlines its article, “Apps a nail in coffin of broadcast mobile TV,” suggesting that cellular users prefer to pick and chose individual TV programs/channels and movies rather than accepting the traditional broadcast TV model with bundles of programs.
The article sees the future for mobile TV as downloading applications for specific video [...]
Wired has published an article headlined, “Americans Don’t Care About Mobile TV” that discusses why mobile television hasn’t done very well in the United States.
The problem, the article concludes, isn’t technological, but cultural, although technology is a problem, too. For example, Americans mostly commute by car (although, of course, [...]
Mobision TV (see left), which launched mobile television service in Iraq in May (as I’ve written), would like to expand its business to other countries, according to Andre Abi-Nassif, the senior vice president of Mobision and deputy general [...]
The huge amount of bandwidth used by Japanese cellular subscribers downloading so much video, including, apparently, lots of porn, is forcing Japan’s cellular operators to implement bandwidth caps on their formerly unlimited data plans, according to Reuters.
The article says because of network congestion, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI have [...]
Based on an unsourced article in DigiTimes, the blogosphere today is somewhat agog over the possibility of Apple and some other handset manufacturers integrating microprojectors into their products by the end of the year.
DigiTimes’ brief article reports the Taiwanese company Foxlink is developing microprojectors in cooperation with a handset [...]
The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), the standards body working on the protocol for Mobile DTV, has increased the classification from “candidate” to “proposed standard” status, reports Broadcasting & Cable.
Officially designated the ATSC-Mobile/Handheld standard, it is being promoted by members of the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) to [...]
From mocoNews.net I see that the Japanese mobile telecommunications giant NTT DoCoMo has purchased 35 percent of the multimedia software company Packet Video for $45 million, according to Packet Video’s press release.
Packet Video has been working with DoCoMo since 1998, and its multimedia player software, pvPlayer, has been incorporated in [...]
Digital Production – Middle East has published a detailed article about developing mobile television content in the Middle East. The article discusses such companies as CNBC Arabia, production and distribution company A2 Avalon and content aggregator Info2Cell.
I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to write more about it. [...]
John Lawson, the executive vice president at ION Media Networks, says mobile television employing the ATSC Mobile DTV protocol “represent[s] the biggest financial upside for the television broadcasting industry since the invention of the 30–second spot,” according to Broadcasting & Cable magazine.
“We see tens of millions of mobile [...]
Apple has produced a 30–second commercial of a skakeboarder that highlights the video recording, editing (see below) and uploading capabilities of its new iPhone 3GS.
From Gigaom I see that Akamai Technologies’ servers will offer HTTP adaptive streaming to the Apple iPhone 3GS and iPod touch via the newest OS X mobile operating system version 3.0, says Akamai’s press release.
As I wrote several days ago, HTTP adaptive streaming adjusts and compensates for [...]
Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee has published an article in Business Week that suggests Apple’s use of HTTP adaptive streaming could dramatically improve the experience of viewing videos. Gannes also implies it could affect business models.
In essence, HTTP adaptive streaming uses the highest available data rate and adjusts the video [...]
ION Media Networks has launched ATSC Mobile DTV service — a mobile television protocol promoted by members of the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) — over its stations in New York City and the Washington, D.C. area, the company says.
The signal is available over ION’s WPXN (Channel 31) in [...]
Iraq’s mobile television offering, Mobision TV, which launched last month, has added CNN, and substituted Art Sports 5 and 6 for Star Movies and National Geographic, according to Andre Abi-Nassif, senior vice president of Mobision.
Abi-Nassif read my article about Mobision and was nice enough to send me an e-mail with [...]
South Korea’s mobile television providers have 22 million mobile television viewers — about 45 percent of the country’s population, according to The Korea Times. However, the providers have been struggling to develop a profitable business model.
The country’s three cellular operators — SK Telecom, KT and LG Telecom — have [...]
YouTube says in its blog that since the Apple iPhone 3GS (see above) was launched last Friday, video uploads to its site have increased 400 percent. Also, during the past six months, uploads from cellular phones to YouTube have increased 1,700 [...]
HTC’s upcoming Android-based cellular phone, the Hero (see below), will incorporate the functionality of Flash Player 9, which employs ActionScript 2, says Adobe’s press release and CNET News.
Although the Hero won’t initially include the more advanced [...]
Bill Stone, the head of Qualcomm’s FLO TV mobile television business, says FLO will offer less expensive plans directly to consumers, rather than through cellular operators, according to The New York Times’ Bits blog. Also, FLO plans to offer service to handsets that aren’t designed for mobile TV.
Stone [...]
Four African countries — Ghana, Kenya, Namibia and Nigeria — are broadcasting DVB-H-based mobile television using content from DMTV and infrastructure equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
MLB.com will begin live streaming select baseball games to the Apple iPhone 3G S and iPod touch (incorporating the new OS 3.0) via its existing $9.99 At Bat 2009 application (see below), reports The New York Times. But one of the most interesting aspects is the possibility it will spark a new [...]
PricewaterhouseCoopers forecasts in its “Global Entertainment and Media Outlook” that consumers will spend $630 million for mobile video in 2012, a dramatic decrease from its previous forecast, according the USA Today.
Last year the firm predicted $2.1 billion for mobile video in 2012. Stefanie Kane, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, says, [...]
Crave U.K. doesn’t like the progress and quality of mobile television in Europe, but has nice things to say about Qualcomm’s FLO TV when the writer visited the United [...]
Ben Haber, an executive at the public relations firm Racepoint Group, blogs that the new Apple iPhone 3G S is bad news for television news stations because everyone now will be acting as citizen journalists.
My reaction: Baloney.
Haber’s views
I want to [...]
Kenyan cellular operator Safaricom has launched a mobile TV service with 13 channels using the DVB-H protocol, according to Kenya Broadcasting Corp. (KBC), which will be one of the channels. The service is available in Nairobi and Kenya’s second largest city, Mombasa, with other cities planned for the future, [...]
Mari Silbey, a tech blogger for Motorola, also blogs in Zatz Not Funny that we’re already in the era of mobile television, although we might not consider it as such.
Silbey writes how her three-year-old daughter was kept [...]
With all the publicity about today’s digital television transition and converter boxes (see left) in the United States, you would think the cellular operators would try to take advantage of it by promoting their mobile television and mobile video offerings — [...]
Today marks the three-year anniversary of Mobile TV Report. On June 12, 2006 I posted five articles about mobile television, plus a sixth introductory piece (see below). Thanks for reading!
Investor’s Business Daily today published an overview of mobile television in light of FLO TV’s expansion into new markets, as I wrote yesterday.
Anne Schelle, the executive director of the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) whose members are promoting the ATSC Mobile DTV standard, says in the article that mobile TV offered [...]
The research firm SNL Kagan says the five top mobile television firms, based on revenues in 2008, are: ESPN, $38.4 million; MobiTV, $23.8 million; MTV Mobile, $22.4 million; CNN, $22 million and Comedy Central, $20 million, according to mocoNews.net.
SNL Kagan estimates the top 18 video providers [...]
Qualcomm's FLO TV mobile television service will expand into 39 new markets in the United States by the end of this year, including 15 new markets immediately after the digital TV transition on June 12, the company says.
The 15 markets include Boston, Houston, Miami and San Francisco. [...]
The Los Angeles Times today has published an overview of mobile television, including Qualcomm’s FLO TV, MobiTV, the standard promoted by the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) and the platform company Transpera.
Bill Stone, the president of FLO TV, says the company might have rolled out [...]
Envivio today announced iLiveTV — a hardware/software solution for encoding and distributing mobile television channels over the Apple iPhone when it’s upgraded with the new OS 3.0 beginning on June 17.
The company says, “iLiveTV includes the Envivio 4Caster C4 world-class video encoding platform, content delivery server software, [...]
ROK Entertainment has launched TINY TV (see below) — 14 mobile television channels over the cellular network of one of India’s major telecommunications companies, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL), ROK says.
PC Magazine gave four stars (see below) — a “very good” — to QuickPlay Media’s PrimeTime2Go mobile television application for the BlackBerry Bold and Curve 8900. Programs are downloaded via WiFi to the handset’s microSD card, and available only in the United States.
Cellular operator MTN Ghana has launched 11 mobile television channels in Accra and Tema, in partnership with pay TV company DSTV and Nokia, according to TeleGeography.
The article says the mobile TV service will include programs from Africa Magic, BBC, Cartoon Network, CNN and Super Sport. MTN [...]
MobiTV (see left) has more than 7 million subscribers to its mobile television service, the company says.
MobiTV has both live streaming and video-on-demand programs. I’ve watched both in the United States over 3G channels on Sprint and' [...]
Users of Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch in 16 European countries may live-stream the ”BBC World News” (see below) for free over 3G and WiFi, after paying 7.99 euros ($11.18) to purchase the application from the iTunes App Store, the BBC reports.
AT&T Services and RaySat Broadcasting have officially launched their joint CruiseCast in-vehicle satellite-based mobile television and audio service (see above) with 22 TV and 20 radio channels, the company says.
CruiseCast is designed for back-seat entertainment systems with monitors installed in the back [...]
At the Computex trade show in Taipei this week, DigiLife is displaying a pocket HD camcorder that incorporates a microprojector (see left), according to Engadget.
The camcorder offers video recording at 720p and a 2.5–inch LCD, which [...]
Iraq has begun DVB-H commercial mobile television service, Mobision, using content from Alsumaria, an Iraqi satellite television network, according to Alsumaria’s press release.
The service began May 28 and features some 20 channels. I don’t know most of them (which isn’t surprising!), but I recognize Al Jazeera (which I’ve watched [...]
Pyramid Research forecasts more than 534 million mobile video subscriptions will generate $16 billion in revenues worldwide in 2014, according to an article in Unstrung.
Those subscriptions in 2014 will be 8.5 percent of all cellular subscriptions, an increase from 2.5 percent today, the firm says. The compound annual [...]
Reports are circulating that the next version of Apple’s iPhone operating system, 3.0, will allow the handset to directly download movies and television programs, rather than users first downloading them to iTunes on their computer and then transferring the videos to the phone, AppleInsider says.
This isn’t a huge change, as the [...]
ChengHsin Hsu will receive his doctorate this semester from Canada’s Simon Fraser University with his thesis, “Maximizing Streaming Quality for Heterogeneous and Mobile Receivers” combined with his prototypes of mobile television base stations and receivers, the University says.
“Hsu has helped design algorithms that enable various types of mobile communication [...]
At The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference occurring now, cable television pioneer John Malone, chairman of Liberty Media, suggests tying content to 4G service.
The WSJ’s All Things Digital weblog reports Malone saying (not necessarily direct quotes), “We got people to pay for stuff by tying [...]
China Telecom has launched mobile television and mobile video services in China over its CDMA 1xEV-DO network using equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks, according to EFYtimes. The article doesn’t provide any information about the type of programs or pricing.
I’ve watched a fair amount of mobile TV in the United [...]
Warner Bros. wants to become a powerhouse for offering different applications — games, graphic novels, webisodes, etc. — on Apple’s iTunes online store (see below), according to Variety.
Warner offers about 15 applications on iTunes and plans to offer a total of 40 [...]
QuickPlay Media’s PrimeTime2Go mobile television service (see left) for BlackBerry phones offers 47 television series from 18 networks, and subscribers average ten to 15 downloads per week, says Mark Hyland, vice president of QuickPlay, in mocoNews.net.
PrimeTime2Go [...]
China Mobile has 3.5 million mobile video users, says JLM Pacific Epoch, quoting a report in Sohu that quotes Lu Xiangdong, a vice president of China Mobile.
[...]Interfax-China has published a detailed article about China's mobile television environment which emphasizes the government-sponsored CMMB (China Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting) protocol for mobile television in concert with the government-sponsored TD-SCDMA (Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) protocol for 3G.
China Mobile is likely to become the country's mobile TV [...]
Nielsen’s “Three Screen Report” says in the first quarter of this year 13,419,000 Americans (see below) watched 3.37 hours of videos per month on their cellular phones.
Significantly more Americans watched in the first quarter of [...]
Worldwide mobile television will grow more than 46 percent (compound annual growth) from now until 2013, according to a new report from market research firm RNCOS.
Poor press release
Note about writing press releases: RNCOS’ release is, unfortunately, an example how to diminish the amount of publicity the report will receive. [...]
Arima Communications has designed handset software that makes it easier to transmit and read SMS messages when watching mobile television, which could increase cellular operator revenues, the Taiwanese company says.
When the SMS-TV software is enabled, the phone’s screen resizes to include an SMS message window which facilitates sending as well as reading messages. The [...]
The entire technology blogosphere will be all over Sprint’s announcement this morning that the Palm Pre (see left) will be available on June 6, but I just wanted to note that the Pre will be include mobile [...]
Market research firm Global Telecoms Insights (GTI) says Asian mobile television is booming — far ahead of Europe and the United States — and it’s influencing consumers’ choices in cellular phones.
GTI says the use of mobile TV in Japan and South Korea has doubled since last year, from 14 percent [...]
Norway has just launched MiniTV (see below) — six mobile television channels in Oslo and surrounding areas — using the DMB protocol, according to the press release.
MiniTV is offered through the Norwegian Mobile TV Corporation (NMTC), which is a joint venture between the three largest [...]
Funded by the European Union, the Mobile3DTV project is developing technology for three dimensional cellular phone displays (see below) using the DVB-H mobile TV standard, according to Physorg.com.
Although 3D has been discussed and offered for years — on and off [...]
Watching videos on cellular phones is becoming mainstream, and the Apple iPhone is the king of the hill for video, says Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of video platform company Brightcove, in a blog posting in The New York Times.
Allaire says the iPhone is such a powerful and popular [...]
A report by market research firm Frost & Sullivan says broadband cellular is driving the growth of mobile video, but cellular operators need to explore new pricing models. That’s hardly news.
Frost & Sullivan says the report’s findings include:
* A major challenge to both providers and consumers alike will [...]
It looks as if SlingMedia’s long-awaited SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone (see below) is finally going to be available — after you pay $29.99 for the software and stream via Wi-Fi only, according to Engadget.
Several weeks ago the [...]
QuickPlay Media says that based on statistics this year from 15 of its services from January 1 to March 31, the total of live television and video streams increased 61 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009. During the same period, the number of [...]
Several years ago, when mobile television and mobile videos were just beginning, a variety of companies were established to produce original cellular phone episodes. Some of the programs have been excellent, and [...]
The BBC’s iPlayer, which is available for a variety of devices, is formatted in about 14 different ways, including for cellular (see below), according CNET Crave UK’s interview with Anthony Rose, the BBC’s Controller of the Online and Media Group.
Jay Srage, Qualcomm’s vice president for Middle East/North Africa, says the company is negotiating with the governments of Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to authorize Qualcomm’s FLO.TV (previously called MediaFLO) for mobile television, according to Digital Production Middle East.
I checked the DVB Project [...]
The FIFA World Cup soccer championship matches (see left) in South Africa next year will spark mobile television usage with more than ten mobile TV channels across Africa, says Stefan Schneiders, the head of business development for mobile TV at [...]
QuickPlay Media has just officially launched PrimeTime2Go (see below), its mobile television service for select BlackBerrys for the United States. I haven’t tried it, but I will, despite some restrictions I don’t like.
As I previously wrote, PrimeTime2Go [...]
Here’s a factoid about mobile TV commercials: BIA Advisory Services estimates local television stations in 2012 could realize $1.1 billion from advertising revenues for mobile television on cellular phones and other mobile devices.
The mobile ad revenues will result from “capitalizing on time-shifts in viewing patterns and the public’s increased desire to [...]
AT&T Mobility lists two mobile television/mobile video applications in the top ten performing apps for the first quarter of 2009, according to the company’s press release.
AT&T Mobile TV is the second top application, with MobiTV as the fifth most popular. Music is the category with the most apps — [...]
The U.K.’s Times says Americans’ response to mobile television is a yawn. So is the Times’ article, unfortunately.
“If mobile TV in Europe is characterised by hype and a confusion of formats, here it is virtually ignored,” says the Times’ correspondent writing from the United States.
The article says that when [...]
Although this isn’t strictly about mobile television, my latest InternetEvolution.com column (see above) about the potential for widgets to help spark the growth of Internet-connected TVs certainly does have a mobile aspect. After all, widgets already are [...]
LiveCast (formerly ComVU) has debuted “Lightning,” an application for live streaming of cellular phone videos — with latency averaging about one second — to professional broadcast studios, the company says.
Although many companies offer live streaming over cellular networks, such as Qik and Flixwagon, LiveCast (see below) specializes [...]
Amanda Congdon, who became an Internet video star on “Rocketboom,” is taking her newest Internet show, “Sometimes Daily,” (see below) to Qualcomm’s FLO TV mobile television service, says Reuters.
“Sometimes Daily” will continue to exist on the Web, but [...]
Nokia has sold its enterprise-oriented mobile television group to Wipro Technologies for an undisclosed amount, according to Information Week.
The group employs about 40 people and was sold as part of a cost-cutting effort. Nokia doesn’t view the group as part of its long-term strategy.
However, Nokia emphasizes that [...]
Tech blogs, such as Ars Technica, have been reporting that Hulu is supposedly working on an application that would allow iPhone users to stream videos. The reports — only from “sources” — say both Wi-Fi and AT&T’s 3G network would work.
I have no doubt this would be a great [...]
Rumors are circulating that AT&T Mobility has pressured Apple to reject SlingMedia’s application that would enable iPhones to access television programs via the SlingPlayer. The Boy Genius Report says AT&T asked Apple to reject the app because it was concerned about bandwidth congestion.
There aren’t any confirmations, although [...]
C21 Media has published a detailed article about MobiTV’s efforts in the United States as well as the company’s interest in exploring European ventures. MobiTV, which has developed its platform (see below) and establishes partnerships with content providers, says it has some six million subscribers and is compatible with about [...]
A camera phone video showing an election official in India requiring a subordinate to perform half-squats for arguing with him has resulted in the removal of the official, reports The Times of India.
The subordinate told the official about a procedural requirement and, as a result, was required “to do 10 half-squats [...]
The European Commission (EU) might authorize new frequencies for satellite services that could be used for mobile television, says Mobile Today.
The EU will offer 18–year S-band licenses for two European-wide satellite ventures, instead of allocating licenses country-by-country, the article reports. The Commission is slated to vote on the issue in [...]
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