Phone Makers Turn On Mobile TV
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Imagine turning on your mobile phone to watch breaking news or an entertainment program. The idea could soon become reality following an announcement last week that five of the world&#39;s largest mobile phone
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Texas Instruments Inc. has begun  developing a chip that could bring television shows to mobile  phone screens in three years.
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(InfoWorld) - Watching TV on a mobile phone could get more interesting next year with new technologies that promise to bring TiVo-like recording functionality to portable devices. Texas Instruments is demonstrating PVR (personal video recording) capabilities for mobiles at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam this week. It is using its own Hollywood digital TV chip and OMAP 2 multimedia processor, along with software from partners PacketVideo and Software Systems (S3). The technology allows people to record a TV program on their mobile phone and then watch it later, on the train on the way to work, for example. The TI package also provides "picture-in-picture" capabilities, allowing a person to watch a prerecorded program and also track a live sports event in a smaller, on-screen window. The PVR technology should find its way into mobile phones in 2007, TI said. It didn't name any handset makers but most of the big vendors, including Samsung ElectronicsÂ and Nokia, are marketing phones for TV viewing. The companies hope the PVR capabilities will draw more people to mobile TV, which the telecommunications industry has been marketing heavily as a way to generate more revenue from consumers and make use of the high-speed 3G wireless networks that operators have been building. Predictions vary for how quickly mobile TV will take off. In-Stat predicts there will be 3.4 million mobile TV subscribers by the end of the year, jumping to 102 million by 2010. Strategy Analytics Inc., another researcher, said the hype around mobile TV remains out of proportion to the evidence of consumer interest. Including PVR capabilities improves the value proposition of mobile TV, but it's unclear whether it will make more consumers willing to pay for it, said Strategy Analytics analyst Nitesh Patel. Offering a picture within a picture on a small portable handset screen is "a bit ambitious," he noted. "It will be interesting to see how this products ties into how much memory gets bundled into handset," he said. "I'm presuming that a lot of memory will be required to store a 1.5 hour movie." If the video is recorded using the H.264 standard, a gigabyte of memory would be enough to store about three hours of 30-frames-per-second video for display on a QVGA 320-by-240-resolution screen, a TI spokeswoman said. Phone makers would decide whether to use flash memory or a hard disk, and how much memory to offer. The demonstration at IBC used TI's DTV1000 Hollywood processor, which is based on the DVB-H mobile TV standard and combines a tuner, demodulator, decoder and some memory on one chip. It also uses its OMAP2430 processor, which can decode two TV channels simultaneously, providing the picture-in-picture capability. The device used was a hybrid phone/PDA built for TI by PacketVideo for the purpose of the demonstration. The OMAP chip has video-out capabilities, which means people on the road could watch their prerecorded TV content on a TV in a hotel room, for example, so long as the phone maker provides the right outputs. Other developments are under way to make mobile TV more palatable for consumers. Samsung said this week it is developing a new display driver that adjusts the brightness of a display according to ambient lighting conditions. Due for mass production at the end of this year, it It should make displays easier to view in broad daylight, Samsung said.
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Five of the world's top mobile-phone manufacturers are joining forces on the delivery of TV broadcasts to handsets, opening yet another opportunity for content providers and hoping to drive demand for next-generation wireless devices and services.
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The big media companies aren't looking at just the Web for new viewers and more advertising revenue. Increasingly, they are turning to mobile devices, and with mixed results.
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Mobile phones were meant to  revolutionize the subscription music business. But if that  revolution were to be televised today, it would consist of  nothing but dead air.
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InfoWorld - Telephones with touchscreen displays that occupy most of their front face are starting to looking like the next big thing in the cellphone market.
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Smartphone users will be able to watch broadband TV and snap high-resolution photos on their handsets in 2007, thanks to new processor and memory chips.
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Cellphones are becoming ubiquitous and the Nielsen Company, the longtime monitor of television consumption, wants in.
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A reality show or soap opera on your mobile phone? This is the vision of top telecoms firms as they hope that from 2006 consumers will sign up for new phones that can receive digital television signals.
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The top two U.S. wireless providers are starting to let customers use their mobile phones to remotely record television shows, hoping the new service will help them compete against rivals.
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Miniature mobile phones, which already double as cameras, Internet devices and music players, are poised to merge with the largest of home appliances, the television.
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The first mobile phones fitted with Google's Android software platform made their debut at an industry trade show on Monday, a key advance in the struggle to bring the power of desktop computing to handsets.
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Europeans' interest in watching mobile  television is as tiny as cellphone screens, a new study showed  on Monday, even though the industry has been buzzing about  offering TV on handsets for years.
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Although mobile phones have long been a part of the business community, they are quietly becoming entrenched in personal lives.
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Mobile television is taking center stage at Europe's annual wireless industry show after years of largely unfulfilled hype, though differing technology standards still blur the picture.
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The mobile phone industry has been  predicting for years that the future of television is wireless.