Mobile Television – Methods and Madness

Television on the phone. It will be highly useful on trains, waiting for planes, or for the more brave, watching while walking down the street. What better way to while away the time in a dentist’s waiting room?

In order to watch TV signals on the phone, a couple things must first be present: a decent color screen on the phone, and a way to receive TV signals. The latter has become pretty common – almost every phone made today has a decent screen. Receiving a TV signal on the phone is a much more interesting challenge as there are several ways to accomplish this goal.

Many of the east-Asian phone companies have integrated regular TV receivers directly into the handsets allowing the users to watch regular broadcast TV. This solution so far has not been adopted into the United States. The two technologies currently found in the states can be divided into two major groups: those that rely on the data-features of the carrier and those that have discrete TV signal broadcasts.

TV as Data
Sprint and Verizon have focused on pushing TV service through their 3G data services. TV shows are converted to digital files and then sent to the phones. This technology is a close cousin of the way video is distributed on the Internet.

The Good: Since the TV signal is piped through the data services, broadcasts are generally available every place the user has a good data connection.
The Bad: Picture quality is mediocre and the TV isn’t a live feed (no sporting events).

Enter MediaFLO
AT&T has decided to go a different route to serve up TV to the cellular phone. They are rolling out a network that distributes TV via discrete signals. In a nutshell, they are broadcasting TV by itself and the phone can pick up on it. As of now, Wirefly offers two phones with AT&T’s Live TV functionality: the LG Vu CU920, and the Samsung Access.

The Good: The TV feed is live, and picture quality is pretty good.
The Bad: The current network where the signal is broadcast is currently limited to certain major citites.

The Bottom Line
TV on the mobile phone is still a developing technology and the coming years will see a lot of upgrades, alterations, and probably false starts. That being said, even somewhat choppy quality is better than nothing when stuck in a dentist’s waiting room.