back to article How to pipe live telly into your pocket with 4G

Mobile TV has had as many false starts as an Olympic 100m sprint final, but Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology could change all that. LTE is one of two contenders for 4G mobile networks, the other being Wimax, although some wags call WiFi a third. It is true though that the proliferation of hot spots both public and private …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    tv on mobile

    Still hasnt really taken off...tablets might change this but many put off by small screen...how many used small hand-held tellies like my 4-battery chewing casio tv?

    My older nokia n96 had dvb-h support....very very few countries had any support for it. A few had a test signal...whoppie doo. Shame...i would have happily used it had it been supported...and more people might have bought such devices.....its certainly much cheaper (as is wifi) than using eg local country network and their roaming charges!

    1. Disco-Legend-Zeke
      Pint

      It' About The...

      ...battery.

      Device makers need to catch up to the battery demand for streams.

      ...usage caps. Carriers need to deliver bandwidth with realistic consumption pricing.

      Wholesale prices for delivery are below 50 cents per GB, and flat rate mega bandwidth is available in many QWEST-now-Century Link cities with no build charge within 1500 ft of existing fiber node.

      Screen size matters a bit also, especially after a pint or two.

  2. Chris Mahon
    Happy

    Tvcatchup works fine on the iPad on 3G already....

    1. jonathanb Silver badge

      If you have an unlimited data plan with no "fair use" restrictions. TV Catchup, like all streaming video services, uses rather a lot of data.

  3. Christian Berger

    Missing a big problem

    All the mentioned technologies require the consent of the TV channel, some of them even the one of the network operator. This means that you won't get the BBC in Germany, or in fact any half decent television.

    So for me it will be VDR plus the streamdevserver-plugin. It can stream live television to a wide array of devices.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dinosaus witht the wrong mindset

    It seems the mobile networks still regard TV as a linear "thing" broadcasting a few (maybe hundreds) of live channels.

    For most however, TV is now (or will include) services like iplayer and other on demand IPTV services including internet only live channels. The best way to handle the live traffic would seem to be IP multicast, though seeing as the mobile networks can't even support IPv6 at present I wish them luck with their laughable proprietary standards. :-)

  5. Annihilator
    Boffin

    Analogy?

    "Mobile TV has had as many false starts as an Olympic 100m sprint final"

    So... not many then?

  6. Andy Hards

    My mate showed me his Slingbox

    Fnar fnar fnar

  7. Guillermo Lo Coco
    Megaphone

    Who want TV?

    I love INTERNET 100%. 12years without lies make feel much more comfortable.

    TV = Mass media brain washing.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    They overlook one problem…

    Who has the time and patience to watch television on such a tiny device?

    Television is painful enough to watch on a semi-reasonable monitor, let alone contorting one's self in order to make one's self comfortable whilst trying to watch it on a little phone.

  9. conhoolio
    WTF?

    DVB Receiver?

    Why not just put a DVB receiver in the bloody phone? This completely avoids the rights-holding and bandwidth issues.

  10. JeffyPooh
    Pint

    "...interference is constructive..."

    ...Moire pattern. At these frequencies, it would be very difficult to keep the peak on the customer. Not impossible, but very very difficult. Even at walking speed!

    Anyway, my iPhone 3GS with "7.2" (~3) Mbps 3G provides excellent video quality on those very few TV channels that are willing to provide it. I've got links and apps that provide about a dozen TV channels, but nothing mainstream. So I kinda sorta thought that the issues were elsewhere than the Last Mile.

    PS: I noticed that the article isn't up to your normal standards. Very stilted structure.

    1. voice of unreason
      Boffin

      Multi-path

      No, that isn't how the SFN works. I do understand the beam-forming point you are making - or its generalisation of signalled precoding matrices in a strong multi-path environment.

      But this isn't beam-formed - indeed, it couldn't be, because it is broadcast with loads of receivers. It is more simple in OFDM, as long as all the transmitters are synchronised within the guard-time (cyclic prefix), the signal just looks like multipath with oomph from several transmitters behind it.

      The SFN gain they are talking about isn't a beam-forming gain, it is not losing any signal-to-noise to adjacent cell interference.

  11. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Unhappy

    None of this fixes the main problem

    Mobile coverage is 2G with islands of EDGE, 3G, and 3.5G. Now patches of 4G, in whatever form it will finally be decided, will be added in the same way. People will want to see mobile TV on the move (public transport), hence the name. It won't take off if it drops down to GPRS every five minutes.

    Perhaps we should concentrate on getting the basics done? I.e. reliable 3.5G coverage.

  12. Trevor 3

    I stream to my mobile all the.time

    I use mythtv with the mythweb plugin, ffmpeg installed.

    I create an ssh tunnel.to my house on my phone, tunnel a port back then stream my tv recordings over mythweb using ff or opera using flash.

    Definately watchable. Bloody good job I have a smart phone!

  13. Steen Larsen
    Happy

    Mobile TV works fine in France

    Here in France all operators have offered TV on their 3G networks at least during the last 3 years. You typically get somewhere between 30 and 70 TV channels thrown in with your monthly subscription. It works fine.

    However, my kids spend more time on Youtube than on those TV channels. No doubt that video on demand is the future.

    Best regards

    Steen

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh great just what we need, even more alienated people being fed TV rubbish everywhere they are.

    Fortunately I just can't see mobile TV ever catching on here, no matter how much bandwidth you pump into it.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Reading through this, I have a feeling this may prove to be another leapfrog in communication tech in the developing world. Look at India - India gave out wireless broadband spectrum earlier this year. The spectrum was much cheaper than mobile 3G spectrum. And, the only national winner looks like they made a very smart move.

    The winner has announced that they'll deploy LTE. And they now have linkages to all the parts needed for this puzzle.

    The winner now belongs to RIL - with billions of dollars in annual free cashflow from oil & gas business, decades of reputation in capital intensive projects ahead of schedule at lower costs that anybody else, and the experience of launching a successful national telecom business from scratch (called RCom now, belongs to a differnt part of the family). Newsflow suggests an attempt at triple play - data, TV, Voice and video telephony - in collaboration with RCom's existing mobile and optical fiber infrastructure. Interestingly, RCom's group companies are large players in the media business - from film and tv content production and distribution, to radio and internet media.

    The cable TV industry is in a mess in India - stuck in old analog technology and used to mafia-like territorial disputes on the ground. Existing broadband options are relatively slow and expensive. The mobile telcos do not have the money, bandwidth or infra to do mobile wireless TV successfully. And, from here, the Indian market directly to relatively cheap high-speed 4G networks with live TV and other media streaming options. Not very different from what happened in the last 10 years - the country went from old copper wireline tech to one of the largest mobile telco markets in the world. This time, it may be faster!

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