A joint venture between Fox, NBC and 10 other major broadcasters is hoping to give mobile television a boost and the Mobile Content Venture has committed to two mobile DTV signals for multiple markets by the end of next year. Will this finally give mobile TV the boost it needs to go mainstream?
The Mobile Content Venture formed earlier this year (with the blandest name imaginable) and it wants to pump out mobile TV content in the DTV format in a live way. If you had a ready device, you would be able to tune into live TV content on the go without having to worry about data connectivity.
The Mobile Content Venture plans to cover about 40% of the nation by the end of next year and these include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dallas, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Houston, Detroit, Tampa, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Orlando, Portland, Cincinnati, Greenville, West Palm Beach, Birmingham, and Knoxville.
This is all part of a push by the Open Mobile Video Coalition to have a standard for mobile TV. The problem I’ve seen so far is that all of these devices require an antenna, which makes it difficult to create a sleek phone that’s capable of utilizing this.
There are some steps being taken to address that, as I’ve seen a dongle which can hook up with your Apple iPad to allows users to view TV content on that tablet screen. I just question if this is the right approach to mobile TV.
With big screens like the Motorola Droid X, people obviously want to watch more content on the go but it may be the app approach which finally wins. We’ve already seen Hulu Plus, Netflix, FiOS and the U-verse app bring on-the-go multimedia content to devices easily and effectively.
Flo TV tried the standalone spectrum approach and it has been a massive failure. Qualcomm has killed the service and is looking to sell the spectrum to AT&T.
[Via MocoNews]