Russel Beatie continues to make his case that mobile handsets are where the action is:Apple shipped 4 million iPods in the past quarter, Palm shipped 1.5 million Treos and Dell shipped 8 million PCs..... Very nice, but Nokia shipped over 50 million handsets in the same timeframe.
Where to you expect to first see widespread use of mobile phones for video reception? I'd bet on Japan.
Depends on what you mean by "widespread". I don't follow the far east markets as closely as the U.S., mostly because their insane technological lead tends to depress me. My vague understanding is that Docomo already offers video conferencing capabilities, but I am not really up to speed on what, if any, pre packaged video content is available on their network. Certainly the have much more bandwidth than we do.
But even here in the states things are already happening. Sprint is now offering MobiTV on it's regular (2g) PCS Vision network. This launched on 11/13/2004. For $9.95 a month "[m]obile subscribers can now flip on their cell phones and tune into a Chris Mathews scream fest on MSNBC. Or the raucous rumblings of 'Dinosaur Planet' on Discovery. Or even Paige Davis and the deleterious decorators of 'Trading Spaces' on TLC."
MobiTV just takes the unedited cable feed and encodes it using a proprietary (I don't know any more) format at around 1 frame per second.
Real has a competing service, also offered by Sprint, as well as from AT&T (I guess Cingular will keep offering it.) They get 5 to 7 frames per second of specifically edited for mobile handset content from the likes of ABC News, CBS MarketWatch, and The Weather Channel. My impression is that the Real is more of a click to download and then watch, while MobiTV is an actual stream.
So I don't know if 1 to 7 frames per second really qualifies, but these are operating over last generation networks. 2.5 and 3(rd) generation networks are already deployed in many areas, so we should see quality really go up in 2005. Sprint's EV-DO network and Cingular/AT&T's Edge and UMTS networks can provide several hundreds Kb/sec. This should be enough for something everyone could agree is "video".
But guessing when this will be widespread is pretty hard. By Q1 2006? At least in major metropolitan areas? I guess that's my guess for the U.S. No doubt Japan and Korea and Hong Kong will be there first.
And oh yeah, Vodafone is doing amazing things with their 3G network in Europe. The mobile telco predicts it will have 10m people using its 3G services by March 2006....
Subscribers will be able to make video calls, download music and watch video clips. News clips come from ITN. Vodafone has done a deal with Twentieth Century Fox to access specially made video content. Fans of 24 will be able to download 24 one minute episodes inspired by the series. Vodafone Live! will also host a "Film of the Month". Subscribers will get access to trailers, clips and associated pictures, ringtones and wallpaper. The first film of the month is the Bridget Jones sequel.
The services will be accessible from Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.
Here's a must read Russel Beattie on the Vodafone 3G launch. (He's not impressed by some of the walled garden aspects of the service.) Apparently Vodafone executives are saying "we've reached parity with Japan's services".
MobiTV sounds like what I was asking about, although 1 fps isn't video -- it's a slide show. Walled gardens and specially packaged content seem like dead ends.
The frame rate limitation is probably a mixture of network and handset limitations. To get really good compression requires a lot of processing power at the receive end -- unless the frame rate is dropped dramatically.
Jesus Christ.
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- jim 11-26-2004 8:27 pm
Where to you expect to first see widespread use of mobile phones for video reception? I'd bet on Japan.
- mark 11-28-2004 4:20 am
Depends on what you mean by "widespread". I don't follow the far east markets as closely as the U.S., mostly because their insane technological lead tends to depress me. My vague understanding is that Docomo already offers video conferencing capabilities, but I am not really up to speed on what, if any, pre packaged video content is available on their network. Certainly the have much more bandwidth than we do.
But even here in the states things are already happening. Sprint is now offering MobiTV on it's regular (2g) PCS Vision network. This launched on 11/13/2004. For $9.95 a month "[m]obile subscribers can now flip on their cell phones and tune into a Chris Mathews scream fest on MSNBC. Or the raucous rumblings of 'Dinosaur Planet' on Discovery. Or even Paige Davis and the deleterious decorators of 'Trading Spaces' on TLC."
MobiTV just takes the unedited cable feed and encodes it using a proprietary (I don't know any more) format at around 1 frame per second.
Real has a competing service, also offered by Sprint, as well as from AT&T (I guess Cingular will keep offering it.) They get 5 to 7 frames per second of specifically edited for mobile handset content from the likes of ABC News, CBS MarketWatch, and The Weather Channel. My impression is that the Real is more of a click to download and then watch, while MobiTV is an actual stream.
So I don't know if 1 to 7 frames per second really qualifies, but these are operating over last generation networks. 2.5 and 3(rd) generation networks are already deployed in many areas, so we should see quality really go up in 2005. Sprint's EV-DO network and Cingular/AT&T's Edge and UMTS networks can provide several hundreds Kb/sec. This should be enough for something everyone could agree is "video".
But guessing when this will be widespread is pretty hard. By Q1 2006? At least in major metropolitan areas? I guess that's my guess for the U.S. No doubt Japan and Korea and Hong Kong will be there first.
- jim 11-28-2004 7:25 pm
And oh yeah, Vodafone is doing amazing things with their 3G network in Europe.
Here's a must read Russel Beattie on the Vodafone 3G launch. (He's not impressed by some of the walled garden aspects of the service.) Apparently Vodafone executives are saying "we've reached parity with Japan's services".
- jim 11-28-2004 8:50 pm
MobiTV sounds like what I was asking about, although 1 fps isn't video -- it's a slide show. Walled gardens and specially packaged content seem like dead ends.
The frame rate limitation is probably a mixture of network and handset limitations. To get really good compression requires a lot of processing power at the receive end -- unless the frame rate is dropped dramatically.
- mark 11-29-2004 6:24 am
Jesus Christ.
- tom moody 1-08-2005 12:01 am