Mobile TV disappoints World Cup fans
(eetasia.com)
Updated: 2006-06-19 10:17 If the climax of the
Brazil-Croatia World Cup match in Germany last week was sound¡ªthe deafening roar
of 72,000 fans cheering the only goal by Brazil's Kaka¡ªthe anticlimax was
definitely video, and the disappointing user experience of trying to watch a
mobile handset in the stadium.
The jerky pictures, dropped frames and frozen images on my mobile handset
took me back a decade to my first headache-inducing struggle viewing "moving"
pictures inside a postage-stamp frame on a PC screen.
I almost waxed nostalgic.
Admittedly, I have followed the development of mobile TV technologies more
intently than the average user. I've built up perhaps unreasonably great
expectations for mobile TV. So I had high hopes that World Cup '06 would be the
defining moment for mobile TV.
The key, I thought, was actually watching mobile TV broadcast signals on a
mobile phone in a real-world setting, not the controlled environment of a
trade-show demonstration.
I should have known better.
Using a mobile TV handset here, I learned a hard truth: Signal conditions
trump everything. If all you've got is a weak signal, there is little to see or
appreciate in a mobile TV broadcast.
The handset in question was a Pocket PC made by HTC. I used a Philips
Semiconductors RF TV tuner/demodulator system-in-a-package housed in an SD card
to enable DVB-H reception. All I had to do to watch the match was insert the
tiny SD card, which included a third-party antenna, into the handset.
The mobile TV signal was generated by T-System, which currently serves as a
DVB-H platform operator. It broadcasts 14 TV and six radio programs. DVB-H-based
mobile TV signals are now available in Berlin, Hamburg, Hannover and Munich
during the World Cup as part of German trials.
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