The US could see live TV broadcasted to mobile devices by the end of 2006. And Verizon Wirless looks set to become one fo the first US carriers to dive in.
Cell phone technology company Qualcomm, through its MediaFlo subsidiary, and wireless operator Crown Castle International, through its Modeo subsidiary, are both investing millions of dollars in new mobile networks that will broadcast live TV programming to cell phones across the country.
With the massively expensive roll-out of 3G broadband mobile technology around the world carriers have at least learnt that downloading TV is popular. The challenge is that their new networks are not really designed to deliver real live TV. At it's most basic this is beacuse 3G is based on "unicast," which means signals are transmitted between a single sender and a single receiver. If 500,000 people in a city decide to watch the same football game on their cell phones, the network has to transmit a copy of the video to each user.
Whereas MediaFlo and Modeo are attempting to build the heavy-duty network that can make mobile TV work. They're working on networks designed for "multicast" transmission, which means they transmit signals once to many devices. Which is how traditional broadcast television works.
So they argue that mobile phone operators need both 3G and MediaFlo/Modeo. And Verizon seems to agree, for they have signed up with MediaFlo. And it looks like running both networks will allow US carriers to charge different amounts for different kinds of content.
So does this all mean that the next generation of high speed mobile networks that carriers build out will incorporate broadcast TV? I guess we'll all have to wait and find out. Let's see how popular the MediaFlo and Modeo services prove to be.
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