Gallery

TV on the move

Posted on 13 Jan 2009 at 12:20

Finally, we arrive at the most exciting strand of the internet TV era: mobile devices. This has always been one of thekey promises of 3G mobile phone networks and portable media players, but until recently nobody had really made it work within the UK. Luckily, that's changing. Catch-up services are being updated to work with phones and media players, and broadcast services - already available in Asia, the US and parts of Europe - will inevitably make their way over here. It's unlikely that watching TV on a mobile phone will ever replace the big-screen experience in the home, but anyone whocommutes or travels regularly will understand why it's good to catch up with the news or a big game on the go.

The BBC's iPlayer is now available on mobile phones, although theoretically only the iPhone and the Nokia N96 are supported. The N96 service is designed for downloading over a Wi-Fi connection rather than streaming on the move, although the latter is supported on some 3G networks. In practice, the N96 client will also run on other devices running theSymbian S60 mobile phone OS, including the N82, 6220, E71 and E90. However, the phone needs to have NokiaWeb Runtime preinstalled, and you need a hacked installation script to get it to work. The BBC's reasoning for restricting official support to the N96 is that it's better designed to handle the WMV format video, and the way it handles media streaming and browsing makes it impossible for users to inadvertently switch from Wi-Fi to 3G without realising - a costly mistake. But if you can find the hacked installer and keep an eye on your connection, there's no reason not to give it a go.

In an ideal world, the N96 would be the king of TV handsets, if only for the simple reason that it's one of only two that sports a DVB-H receiver (the other being Samsung's P960). DVB-H - asuperset of the DVB-T platform that Freeview is based on - is a broadcast standard designed specifically to stream digital TV to mobile devices. It's an official pan-European standard, and is now in active use in Italy, Finland, France, Switzerland and Austria, but sadly, the N96's support for DVB-H is all but useless over here. While Brussels wants member states to allocate the 470-862MHz band freed up by the analogue TV switch-off to DVB-H, our own governing body, Ofcom, has a policy of auctioning off bandwidth to companies and allowing them to decide what they do with it. The competing MBMS standard is popular with carriers over here - including Orange and T-Mobile, which have both conducted trials - and is the official TV provision of the existing GSM 3G standard. TheUS company Qualcomm recently won the UK's 1,452 to1,492MHz L-Band spectrum, and is believed to be reserving it for services based on its own MediaFLO TV mobile broadcast system, which is popular with mobile carriers in the US.

Still, at least if you get a DVB-H handset you can watch TV abroad, right? Probably not. While DVB-H is a broadcast content delivery platform, it's complemented by DRM and interactive features carried over 3G networks, and most services in European countries charge for using the service. This is the only thing preventing you from picking up and using the signal in whichever DVB-supporting area you find yourself - as in the early days of DVB-T, few nations have managed a true nationwide rollout - but it's enough. Maybe this is why DVB-H has yet to really take off anywhere outside of Italy. In April, Nokia's own head of internet services told a Helsinki conference that "we have seen that there are multiple segments who are not interested in broadcasting, but rather in downloads". In other words, services such as the iPlayer might make DVB-H and rival systems virtually redundant.