Washington DC announced as first MPH mobile TV market
In the 22 city-strong foot race to get a live MPH-based mobile TV network up, running, and available to anyone who wants it, it looks like Washington DC's poised to come out on top. Raleigh has already deployed a handful of transmitters for the benefit of bus-goers, but the Open Mobile Video Coalition has announced that Washington DC's local CBS, PBS, NBC, and Ion affiliates plus a Fox-owned independent will all be ready to roll with MPH transmissions by late summer; of course, what remains to be seen is what sort of hardware will be ready to take advantage of the tech by then. We can likely count AT&T and Verizon out for offering MPH-enabled handsets seeing how they're still trying to figure out how to profit from their MediaFLO-based networks, so T-Mobile and Sprint's decisions to take a wait-and-see approach to the mobile TV phenomenon may really end up working in their favor here. Moving beyond the phones, it's said that Dell will be showing some sort of netbook this week with an integrated MPH tuner at the NAB show in Vegas this week, while Kenwood has in-car solutions in the works. As long as the broadcasts stay free -- which by all accounts they will -- the standard has a fighting chance at relevancy, assuming hardware comes to the table.
























Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Patrick Joseph @ Apr 20th 2009 5:09AM
Trials were conducted in early 2008, works well while traveling up to 140mph.
http://ces.cnet.com/8301-13855_1-9841395-67.html?tag=more
I'm very happy we're finally going to get the choice to have portable tv's (pocket tv's and in-car systems) where we can watch local broadcast with the new digital system, it's long overdue.
squiggleslash @ Apr 20th 2009 10:32PM
The portability part isn't as interesting as the fact these devices are presumably low power. One of the major issues I have with the great analog switchover is that there are a lot of low power battery powered NTSC TVs in circulation but virtually no battery powered ATSC sets, let alone such devices at low prices.
I live in a place ravaged by three hurricanes in two years (albeit 2004 and 2005), so this is important to me.