Mobile Digital TV: Not (Yet) to a 3G Celly
Today, Portable Reportable looks at the future of cell phone broadcasting and consider what will happen when cell phones will be able to received digital TV broadcasts. NTT DoCoMo and KDDI have quite different plans on how consumers will use digital TV. KDDI appears to be planning to allow the handset to receive digiTV and then use the phone’s 3G data connection as the viewer feedback, marketing, and sales channel — similar to how the FM Keitai works now with analog radio and the preinstalled BREW application.
Full program run-time: 5:01Portable Reportable audio updates are short, 3- to 5-minute news items in MP3 format. You can listen via PC or download and copy to your portable player for tomorrow morning’s commute. — Eds.
Today’s program closes out a 3-week series of reports looking at the broadcast of media — analog TV and FM radio — to cell phones. In the first program, we looked at the new multimedia phones from Vodafone Japan capable of receiving analog TV signals. Last week, we reviewed the “FM Keitai” sold by 3G cellular carrier KDDI in partnership with Japanese broadcaster Tokyo FM.
The FM Keitai, or FM cell phone, is the world’s most successful example of broadcasting traditional media content to a cell phone — and has been successful at least in part due to the preinstalled BREW application that allows listener feedback, and serves — You guessed it! — as a sales and marketing channel.
Last month, Nikkei Electronics reported that Japan’s public broadcaster, Nippon Hoso Kyokai — or NHK — and five private-sector broadcasters are planning to start broadcasting terrestrial digital signals to cellular phones within fiscal 2005, which means by March 2006. The broadcasters have reached an agreement with the private US company that owns the rights to MPEG encoding technology thus allowing the Japanese broadcasters to use the H.234 MPEG-4 format in exchange for license fee payments.
See our video program from NHK’s open-house here
— Daniel Scuka