Mobile TV Phones by End of the Year

About 125 million consumers will be watching television on their mobile phone in five years from now, a new survey found on Thursday. Mobile television is not yet commercially available, but trials are carried out around the world, and consumers are expected to be able to pick up the first TV phones by the end of the year. Handset makers will sell 130,000 TV phones this year, rising to 83.5 million by 2010, research group Informa said.

Mobile TV signals will be handled by special chips on a mobile phone that sit alongside the chips that process the mobile phone’s calls, music and streaming video clips. The difference between TV and streaming video services will be that the TV signals are broadcast to all users at the same time, while streaming video will be delivered on demand by mobile operators.

Nokia has said it will introduce a mobile TV phone in the first half of 2006 and expects volume sales as early as in the second half of 2006. Samsung Electronics from Korea has also showed its first TV phones.

Reuters

WindowsForDevices: Calling it the next "killer app for cellular handsets," ABI Research says that television is on its way into mobile phones. This development is expected to add a new set of players to the "cellular ecosystem" such as broadcasters, content providers, and advertisers, according to a new ABI study.

Alan Varghese, ABI Research’s principal analyst of semiconductor research, disagrees. "Consumers can watch TV when sitting in a taxi or train, or in any waiting room," he says. "For optimum TV viewing, the best viewing distance is 5x the screen size. That is exactly the distance people hold their cell phones, and typical screen resolution is now sufficient for TV."