Over the next three years the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. is investing $50 Million in mobile television. Commercially launching the service in the middle of this year are PLDT subsidiaries: MediaQuest Holdings lnc. and Smart Communications Inc., with a tiered pricing at par with cable television subscriptions. It will be available to Smart and Talk and Text users on post paid or pre-paid basis.
The service will be available in Manila, Cebu and Davao under test broadcast starting March 11 this week which has a pending license application at the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC). Mediaquest and Smart’s Mobile TV uses the Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld (DVBH) platform. It offers 9 channels, including 24 hour news channels CNN, BBC World and CNBC, a sports channel, Basketball TV, leisure and entertainment channels such as Fashion TV and Jack TV plus music channel MTV. President Napoleon L. Nazareno says that “Many countries in Europe, Australia and Asia are already testing mobile TV. Subscribers in Europe find it very exciting and We are giving TV a new face, that of the mobile handsets.”
Mobile TV will complement Smart’s Third Generation (3G) services according to Media Quest President Orlando B. Vea. However, unlike streaming video service over 3G or GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), where each recipient gets a separate copy of the program stream, mobile TV operates a simultaneous TV broadcast signal that any number of users can receive anytime. Filipino viewers can watch their favorite TV programs anywhere, anytime in their mobile phones. Still, the biggest drawback of Mobile TV at present is the prohibitive price of the DBVH-enabled handsets, at US$400-500 per unit.
According to Media Quest President Orlando B. Vea they expect that by the end of 2008, mobile TV handsets will be more affordable at $200 per unit. Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson and Motorola are manufacturing mobile TV handsets. He also predicted that in the future, all cellular phones will have mobile TV capacity. In the countries that have launched commercial mobile TV, consumers used mobile TV to monitor breaking news, watch their favorite sports events and soap operas and to fill dead time during long commutes, while stuck in traffic or waiting in a line.
[tag]mobile TV[/tag]
Written by Lito Montala
Lito Montala was an online entrepreneur who enjoys blogging about entrepreneurship and gathering information for his blog to help budding entrepreneurs. You can also reach him on twitter: http://twitter.com/LitoMontala
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