MobiTV Coming to Treo Smartphones Soon
MobiTV, a live internet television service for mobile phones, is coming to the Treo Smartphone soon. PalmInfocenter has been beta testing the new service, read on for more details and screenshots.
The MobiTV service offers many popular TV channels such as MSNBC, ABC News Now, NBC Mobile, CNBC, FOX Sports, The Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, The Weather Channel, Comedy Time, California Music Channel, Major League Baseball Highlight Channel and others including country-specific channels outside the United States. There are 25 channels included on the current Treo beta.
The service works by sending a live video stream to your handheld over your internet connection. I tested it out on a Sprint Treo 650 and the framerate was very consistent. Aside from a few delays here and there the video was very fluid and the sound was excellent as well. I was really impressed at how well the picture came in and everyone I showed the app to was blown away. It really is just like having live TV on your Treo.
Availability is "soon", meaning that MobiTV for the Treo is about to go into carrier certification testing and the app will be available as soon as it gets certified. Users can sign up to be notified when the service becomes available for the Treo here.
The MobiTV service is currently available in the US through Sprint PCS, Cingular, and certain regional carriers; in the United Kingdom through Orange UK; and will be available to Canadian customers through Rogers and Bell Canada. It is expected to first launch in the US on Cingular, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless.
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RE: I'm already using it
RE: Cost?
Any other simular products
since this is up, are there any other simular products that are offered for the treo 600/650?
RE: TV-to-go
And just wait until bandwidth increases. Drop a cellphone radio into a Tungsten 5-sized device, add an OLED screen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, CompactFlash and SD slots, high quality speaker + microphone and suddenly PDAs are back in vogue. Too bad for Palm that a multitasking OS is ideal for this kind of next-generation device...
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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
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The Palm Economy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038
RE: Any other simular products
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David
RE: Any other simular products
And by over the air I don't mean crystal clear HD OTA signals. I mean snow-filled analog tunin' goodness like grandma used to have!
I've always wondered why (space constraints and geek factor aside) anyone wanted to bother with a TV tuner card (or even an ATI All in Wonder) for their PC when you can get a $50 13" set that ends up being far more satisfying for just "showing" TV. I couldn't imagine TV on a PDA being anything more than a power, space, and cost hog (have you ever felt how hot the sardine can analog tuner module on TV tuner PCI/AGP cards gets?)
RE: Any other simular products
I'd expect that any company producing such a device (impossible) would sell about 3 of them before they went out of business after wasting a couple million $$$ developing it.
From now on, the operative word for content delivery and software design is SIMPLICITY. Grandma isn't gonna be juggling Rube Goldberg-style SD card attachments just so she can watch her soap opera on her phone while waiting to pick up the grandkids from school. No matter how technically difficult a technology is to implement, the end user interface MUST adhere to the KISS principle. Palm's success stems directly from the fact that Rob Haitani and Jeff Hawkins both understood this tenet and also were wise enough not to attempt to overreach the limits of their hardware.
Solly Cholly.
TVoR
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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
------------------------
The Palm Economy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038
RE: Any other simular products
Remember Hawkins' wooden block! Aside from the easily dislodged contrast wheel & lack of a backlight (probably a cost factor at the time, actually), the original Pilot was and STILL IS a near-perfect design for a handheld. It has the essentials without going overboard. Even the icons on the hardbuttons make sense!
About the only reason Avantgo is still hanging in there is that it's simple. Plop your PDA into the cradle or onto the cable, hit the sync button and (sooner or later) bingo, (most of) your channels are there when it finishes syncing.
RE: Any other simular products
Exactly. I was thinking about that radio card, the camera cards and all those ridiculous (vaporware) Springboard modules when I was writing the above reply. If it's not part of the integration, it's part of the problem...
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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
------------------------
The Palm Economy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038
RE: Any other SIMILAR products
The aerial that you'll have to attach to such a card to get a signal won't be so cool though. Face it, even the latest dedicated "pocket TVs" find it difficult to pick up a decent signal without a large decent aerial attached to it, and that's with 25 years of trying with the best technology and electronics available. What hope for a tiny SD card?
I think almost all broadcasting in future will be over the net (just look at podcasts, even Jeff Kirvin can preach to the Palm faithful now!) but maybe it'll be 10 to fifteen years before the fast enough bandwidth is so universally available that the radio/TV transmitters can be turned off.
"What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog" - Dwight D. Eisenhower
RE: Any other simular products
I read an article sometime, somewhere that gave a lot of details on the issue. Bottom line: sooner or later, digital tv will be available on handset/pda devices. The issue is the standard.
Right now television services are offered by 3g companies at prices that are not cheap, since they usually charge for both the service and the bandwidth. But the forecoming standard(s) should allow the bypass of the 3g infrastructure and its current limitations.
Update: this article gives a few details
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/11/3g_mobile_video/
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Waiting for a TT successor
RE: Any other simular products
Well, I already have a 19" monitor, so which makes more sense: spending $50 on a 13" TV, or spending $40 on a TV tuner and $10 on a remove which turns my computer into a 19" flat panel TV with TIVO-like functionality?
the end of the road
But why use two-way telecom wireless network to deliver a TV program which can be delivered by broadcasting network?
cann't think of any other way to make money?
Freeloader?
1) Care to list any other phones that allow you to pick up any TV stations ANYWHERE?
2) The future is integration: cellphone, camera, videocamera, MP3 player, video player, email, IM, Internet, TV, voice recorder, PIM, all in one relatively small device.
3) Cellphone companies aren't charities and they aren't governments. They've invested BILLIONS in licensing and creating a telecommunications infrastructure - do you think it's reasonable for them to try and make some money back? Or do you think EVRERYTHING should be free?
------------------------
Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
------------------------
The Palm Economy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038
RE: the end of the road
And in (I think) South Korea there is that new mobile TV standard for devices like phones... (by the same standards body for DVB I think?)
How about a T5 or Life Drive?
RE: How about a T5 or Life Drive?
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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
------------------------
The Palm Economy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038
RE: How about a T5 or Life Drive?
-Ryan
RE: How about a T5 or Life Drive?
MobiTV's content licenses currently limit the application to mobile phones only. The app also uses a AMR sound protocol that is only built into the Treo.
-Ryan
I'm sure, like picsel browser and opera mini, the license wont stop people from trying to rip off the application and use it in a way the developer did not agree with, especially with prominent POS advocates endorsing such behavior.
http://www.1src.com/forums/showthread.php?t=95145&page=2&pp=15
Surur
Jeff Kirvin advocating using STOLEN apps??? Wow!
This guy's one of the most two-faced individuals I've ever had the misfortune of encountering in the past 9 years using Palms.
------------------------
Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
------------------------
The Palm Economy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038
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I'm already using it