Major MobiTV improvements coming next month
Likely feeling pressure to innovate as competitors like DVB-H and MediaFLO close the mobile TV gap, MobiTV is prepping a plethora of improvements to its software and back end that should be hitting customers everywhere next month. Perhaps the single biggest improvement will be the system's capability to multicast programming on the fly based on the real-time popularity of a channel in a given area, rather than unicasting it and requiring significantly more bandwidth be sapped from the data pipe. Speaking of real-time, ads will now be injected on the fly -- and they'll be targeted, too, giving users some semblance of a reason to not change channels or put the phone back in their pocket when their program cuts to commercial break. MobiTV also says that it has somehow managed to cut channel change times down to a second or less -- a huge improvement over the existing software -- addressing a complaint leveled by many a MobiTV user over the years. Sure, AT&T's rolling out MediaFLO next month -- but if there's a message in these developments here, it's that these guys don't plan on slipping quietly into the night.
