dvb-h
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LG U900 announced for Hutchison in Italy
Yeah, we know, we're getting a little granular on this one, but remember LG's then-unnamed swiveling DVB-H handset? The one with the weird vaguely W300i-like buttons? Well, it was officially announced in Italy as the U900, and will see service through Hutchison's 3 network with UMTS service and, of course, their exclusive Italian DVB-H broadcast rights to the World Cup. The 1.3 megapixel and VGA cameras won't hurt, nor the 58MB internal flash, but what will, however, is a 3 hour battery lifespan watching video. That's still more than enough for a match, though, which is all it really needs to be, we suppose.
ComVu enables live video broadcasts from phones
If citizen journalists have been waiting on live broadcasts from 3G Windows Mobile phones to DVB-H receivers to begin their revolution of fair, balanced, and cute-cat-centric news, the time has come. ComVu, in conjunction with Modeo, has just announced their PocketCaster software for Windows Mobile 5.0 that uses Windows Media codecs to transmit live video to DVB-H users. Modeo hopes to provide those users, with their DVB-H smartphone and networks already in the works. Details are sparse, but we're guessing that video will have to make a stop at a central location before it gets sent out over the DVB-H infrastructure, so there's always the chance that someone might try to cut out the thirty minutes of feline napping in our latest documentary epic -- but we can feel the tides of power shifting.[Via The Web To Go]
Hiwire to compete with MediaFlo, Modeo's DVB-H
Another major player has joined Qualcomm and Crown Castle with plans to enter a nascent mobile TV market whose future is wildly uncertain. Aloha Partners L.P. will ultimately spend $500 million to roll out its Hiwire service nationwide on the 700MHz spectrum, which it will share with Qualcomm's MediaFlo, and which is considered superior to the 1600MHz spectrum owned by Crown subsidiary Modeo. However, Hiwire will join Modeo in adopting the DVB-H standard for mobile TV, as opposed to the proprietary MediaFlo technology that will be embedded into CDMA handsets. With Verizon already committed to offering the Qualcomm tech to its customers, Hiwire will need to partner with either Cingular or T-Mobile if it expects to gain a similar foothold in the GSM market, and even then, its success will largely be based on consumers' willingness to adopt a service that so far they have shown little interest in.[Via MobileTracker]
Modeo's DVB-H smartphone
Not sure when, or even if, this phone is ever going to be released (at least in its current form), but Microsoft is showing off a Windows Mobile-powered Smartphone from Modeo at its booth here at CTIA that comes with a DVB-H receiver for watching mobile digital video broadcasts. The phone itself is par for the course for a Windows Mobile Smartphone (the phone is actually made by HTC) -- it has quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, a 2.2-inch, QVGA display, Bluetooth 1.2, a 200MHz OMAP processor, 128MB of Flash ROM, 64MB of RAM, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, and a microSD memory card slot. With this thing it's really all about the DVB-H tuner, and the demo Ryan and I saw of QVGA resolution, 30 fps video was pretty tight. The whole point of DVB-H (and DMB and MediaFLO) is that you can watch digital TV on your phone or handheld without any of the stuttering, caching, or picture quality issues that are largely unavoidable when you stream over a wireless data connection. Modeo is already testing its DVB-H network here in the States, but have not yet said when they'll be launching commercially (getting the carriers to agree to sell phones with DVB-H tuners is a ridiculous complicated affair). Click on for a few more pics.
