There's obviously a clear push by the various mobile operators to convince us that we need television on our mobile phones. Research (or is it Sales Engineering?) suggests that recent trials have gone so splendidly well that mobile phone users not content with the existing content of ringtones, wallpapers, bad jokes and mp3 downloads at £2.50 a pop will happily splash out £8 per month to have television and radio broadcast to their phone. Quite how this is going to work reliably over cellular networks is still a bit of a mystery to me given that I live on a hill once used to transmit vitally important radio signals to the Cabinet War Rooms and yet Orange seem unable to provide a decent signal to my phone but I digress...
Whether this £8 per month (£96 per year) assumes a television licence fee or not is unclear and the
television licensing web-site doesn't indicate whether there will be a sliding scale based on the size of your screen or frame-rate, as yet.
There's an interesting article on the market research and trend analysis company
Ovum's web-site:
Over the past four months, BT Movio, together with Virgin Mobile, has been broadcasting digital TV and radio using DAB-IP enabled smartphones to 1,000 users in London's M25 area. The trial results give a glimpse into end-user demand for such a service, a prerequisite for BT Movio to sign up its target customers - the mobile service providers - and to determine the kind of return it can make on the wholesale side.
BT Movio says it is pleased with the findings, which show that two thirds of customers would be prepared to pay up to £8 per month for the service on their current mobile network, with over a third of users willing to leave their current network to get the service. Wholesale pricing is expected to be on a per-user basis, with mobile service providers free to set their own retail pricing and marketing plans.
The service certainly promises to remove some of the complexity involved in supplying TV to mobile handsets. It enables mobile service providers to secure content from a range of content providers without having to enter into individual negotiations on licensing and other matters. It allows for speedy market entry with incremental investment in what will, to some extent, be a time of trial and error in terms of end-user take-up. And by using DAB broadcast technology, BT Movio overcomes capacity and scalability issues involved in using 3G networks for this type of service. Initially, wholesale customers will all have to take the same content. However, 12 months down the line, caching is expected to deliver niche content options.
More...
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Now I'm showing my age here but I remember buying one of those Sinclair black & white 2" TV's that ran for hours off a battery and cost me nothing to watch although theoretically I was supposed to be covered by the TV licence fee (
for those reading outside the UK you should know that every household that contains a television must pay £126.50 per year for colour and £42 B/W). This nifty device was later replaced by an even niftier colour version from Casio that I later lost at Glastonbury.
You can also now get an
SD card upgrade for your PPC that will turn your device into one of the above retro devices and watch standard, dare I say retro, broadcast TV in VHF or UHF frequency subject to where you reside.
Bringing this to the core subject of this site which is the use of mobile technologies in learning one can immediately see the benefit of streaming television and radio to pupils devices but I'm wondering whether this technology currently touted by the operators is the right one given that a pupil can download a
vodcast or
podpast overnight while their device is re-charging. I also seriously wonder whether people will pay this magical £8 per month to have access to TV on their mobile?
I've put up a poll which I hope members will at least vote on even if you don't wish to add your comments but this convergence is coming and I hope worth discussing here
Go on...
FORUM
Content 
Poll
