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.
posted Apr 20th 2009 3:28AM
haha too bad the chinese already beat them to it. Lots of chinese phones come with TV.
China, Japan, Korea etc... but come on, at least they're trying here :) Thats better then nothing at all. :)
They're sticking to 8VSB and relying on *massive* FEC and dual streams for the ATSC Mobile DTV standard? They should of switched to CODFM. Sheesh. At least the ATSC Mobile DTV standard, so far, allows MP3, AAC and HE-AAC for the audio part and allows MPEG-4 AVC for the video instead of just MPEG-2. Least they got two out of three parts right... 8VSB is *horrible* in a multipath environment (i.e. metro downtown areas, large buildings, etc) and occurs frequently when moving (i.e. cars, buses, vans, trains, etc.)
I'm curious to see how the trials go. Hopefully my fears are unfounded...
I love how it seems like Maury was the first show to broadcasted like this.
WTF that's Maury! There was nothing better on? Wow I definitely don't need this if I'm going to get shows like Maury.
What are you talking about? Maury is pure gold. ---> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt2i0ts-uck
Oops, sorry for the double post. :)
I've actually used the chinese phones and the TV works pretty well, but the hardware is pretty sh!tty
it's just another gajet for the already spoiled Americans! But products make money & money makes the world go round & round!
DC Rules!!!! Figuratively and Literally.
Yeah its much better than forgotten Washington state, DC FTW! Unfortunately the ATSC standard needs some tidying up.
Great, just what we need, another way for people to be distracted while driving. We have enough accidents, don't need more.
I saw someone at the bar Sat night with one of these and couldn't figure out what the hell it was. Now I know...
I know I might be late, but i never heard and cant find it on google so no smart asses, but what is MPH TV? Is it free like OTA antenna?
Yea. Even less bandwidth for the HD programming here in the nation's capital. The D.C. CBS and PBS are already beyond reproach with stream quality, and our ABC can't even figure out if they're 1080i or 720p of late. Not to sound like a total downer, but stealing even more of the very limited ATSC stream rates for a tech that may or may not ever even take off seems foolhearty at best. The only saving grace for us OTA-ers is that all the local hard-wired providers still get the exact same stream we do. So all the Comcast and FiOS folks will see the same degradation of quality.
I don't think this will work all that well anyway. With 2 of the major networks going back to VHF (ABC 7 and CBS 9) in June, the size of the antenna required for enough gain to keep 8VSB working while mobile will likely be prohibitive for the devices they're targeting here.
Sorry gang, but I truly hope this one falls flat on it's face and is out of here soon. It just should not be done on the same channels as the main programming. Too many quality issues already, this will just exascerbate it even further.
DVB-H. Standards bitches.