Mobile TV might actually work, says analyst

Posted by Al Warmington on Thu 23 Oct 2008

Excellent news if you've signed up til 2010 on your N96 contract

Much though we love having the BBC's iPlayer on our handheld devices, if things had turned out differently, we could be getting live TV streamed straight to our handsets. Trials have been held in the Oxford area of the UK since 2005, but it's yet to roll out commercially in this country. According to one group of analysts, that could change over the coming year.

Getting live TV to a portable device isn't that hard. In fact, there's already a standard in place, called DVB-H, which is endorsed by the European Union and used across the continent, although mainly in Italy.

Nokia actually has released a few handsets already that pack a DVB-H receiver inside, including the recent Nokia N96.

So what gives? The problem seems to be that not many people want the service. As TV viewing is slowly but surely transferring to an on demand model, plain old live streaming may just not be what people are looking for. Perhaps we'd rather the commercial channels just followed Auntie's with their own digital catch-up services.

However, analysts from Frost and Sullivan reckon there may be a future for DVB-H in the UK after all. Their recent survey suggests that DVB-H will be a unified standard by 2010 and that there's going to be a large financial incentive for companies to get in on the act.

They reckon the mobile telly industry will be worth a very serious �6.8bn (around £5.4bn) by then.

(via TechRadar)