iPhone gets live Sky Mobile TV, O2 offering 3 months' free access
[Via Daily Telegraph]
Read - Sky Mobile TV launches on App Store
Read - O2 Sky Mobile TV 3 months free offer
mobileTV posts

Mmm, nothing like a pinch of predictability to wake us in the morning. Just days after the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) finally announced that a North American mobile DTV standard was struck, Samsung has jumped in with what it's calling the planet's first single chip solution designed to handle those very transmissions. All we're told is that the solution combines RF and "digital chip components" into one 65 nanometer chip, making it ideal for smaller devices such as smartphones, car-mounted televisions and portable media players. Of course, Sammy doesn't even bother to mention a mass production date, so we're guessing we all just rise awkwardly and start a roaring slow clap to celebrate the accomplishment.
This one is still only in the very earliest stages, but it looks like MobiTV has taken advantage of the big National Association of Broadcasters Show in Vegas this week to show off a new mobile DTV service that it's developed in partnership with Sinclair and PBS, which it hopes will eventually find its way to a few interested cellular carriers. The service itself is a combination of free over-the-air DTV broadcasts (from PBS and the CW, at the moment) and subscription-based on-demand content, which would apparently be made available for a seven-day window and be delivered via mobile WiMAX. Unfortunately, there's no indication whatsoever of a potential roll-out, but it looks like MobiTV will be working hard during the next few days to woo some additional partners, so there's at least a slight chance that we could be hearing a few more details before the show wraps up later this week.
It turns out that MediaFLO's US network might not be as close to operating capacity as we'd thought, because AT&T wants to bring you live broadcasts of every single game of the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship this month on its Mobile TV system -- and in order to do so, "up to four additional seasonal channels" will spring out of thin air to pick up the load. For non-basketball lovers, it's great news because no other programming will be killed off to accommodate it, and for basketball lovers, it's good news because... well, it's a lot of basketball we're talking about here. The special channels should spring to life on March 19 when the first round of the tournament kicks off.
You can only pimp a pricey, woefully underutilized multimedia network for so long before drawing the conclusion that there's probably something fundamentally wrong with your business model, and indeed, operators around the world have had nothing but trouble attracting subscribers to premium mobile TV services as they've launched over the past few years. The head of the FLO Forum -- the nonprofit group tasked with advocating MediaFLO -- is now acknowledging that mobile TV needs some free, ad-supported content in order to get off the ground (it's just too bad the key players couldn't have figured that out before launching two services in the States), noting that South Korea and Italy have seen some limited success going that route. People like free stuff, but it remains to be seen exactly how Qualcomm and others are going to be able to sell enough advertising space and combine it with enough compelling premium content to get some return on investment; nationwide mobile TV networks don't just build themselves, after all.







