Monday, July 31, 2006

DVB-H rockets ahead in Italy

3 Italia has this week filed a document at DVB Project saying that it already has 111,000 clients in the first five weeks (from 6 June to 11 July) after it was introduced on 6 June, making its take off even faster than the S-DMB service that was launched late last year in Korea – but then again Korea is a slightly smaller country, Italy has 58m people against Korea's 48m.

It took around three months to reach the first 100,000 users of S-DMB, and in Italy this has been achieved in under half the time. The key has been the wide availability of the network, with 1,000 transmitters supposedly covering 2,000 Italian cities (read towns rather than cities), and the idea that people can sample it by buying just a day or a week's TV at a time.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Sling Media Slingbox

This device sits at home attached to a telly or PC equipped with a built-in TV card and accessible video content. You'll need to have a working broadband link and a home network. If you have UPnP (the Universal Plus and Play protocol), setting up this last item should be a doddle.

SlingBox Personal Broadcaster -

If the SlingBox Personal Broadcaster actually works, you'll be able to watch or listen to anything available on your home TV or stereo from any high-speed Internet connected device anywhere in the world. The $199 box connects to your home entertainment system and sends what's playing there out over the Internet to your computer or PDA in real time (Sony's LocationFree TV operates on a similar principle). SlingMedia says this thing will even let you watch TV from your mobile phone, but that could mean some jerky images accompanied by indecipherable audio, at least until we get to a Japanese-level of cellphoneness.

Friday, July 21, 2006

3 Italia hails growth of its mobile TV service - Technology - International Herald Tribune

The Italian cellphone company 3 Italia said Thursday that its mobile television service attracted 111,000 clients in the first six weeks after it was introduced June 5 to coincide with the World Cup soccer tournament in Germany.

3 Italia is the first company in Europe to roll out commercially a mobile television service based on a technology called DVB-H, for Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld. Many analysts say DVB-H will become the dominant technology for broadcast mobile television because it is backed by Nokia, the largest maker of cellphones.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Virgin readies UK's first mobile TV broadcasts - ZDNet UK News

Virgin Mobile is on track to launch the UK's first true mobile broadcast TV service, a rebadged version of BT’s Movio product, in the autumn.

Movio, which completed a successful trial earlier in the year, uses the same frequencies as DAB digital radio but enhances them to provide a limited number of TV channels, a system known as DAB-IP (Digital Audio Broadcasting — Internet Protocol).