Telegent and ZTE to offer FTA Mobile TV on ZTE Handsets

ZTE are maybe not that well-known to you as a handset vendor – probably their most public presence has been some handsets they have supplied to Hutchison 3G at the budget end of the market. But, ZTE is a growing giant, which plays in both mobile network infrastructure AND handsets…… now they have done a deal with Telegent to utilise it’s Mobile TV chip to deliver Free-to-air (FTA) TV to it’s handsets, once the embedding process is done.

Telegent’s mobile TV solution enables consumers to receive all local broadcast channels no matter where they are, providing consumers with a compelling, free and easy-to-use method of watching the same news, sports and other programming that they receive on their TV sets at home. For operators, free-to-air TV handsets provide access to the most popular content without requiring any investment in new standards, infrastructure or programming. Telegent’s solutions are currently available in more than 80 handset models worldwide sold in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe and Africa.

I think the assumption here is that it would have to be a DVB-T Tuner, since this is a prevalent form of Digital TV for home subscribers. Interestingly, they wouldn’t be the first to go down this route – I have a couple of Gigabyte handsets that I am due to review soon – one of which also has this DVB-T feature.

One thing that will be critical either way is how the device manages to deal with the signal strength – particularly in the UK, Digi-Terrestrial TV really suffers when you have an average or poor signal – perhaps the new Moby devices will have a 20m extending aerial!

[Via: Quamnet.com]