Well, that was the headline on Friday's Evening Standard...
New technology will allow people to watch news, sports and movie channels on their handsets 24 hours a day was announced at the annual Royal Television Society conference by BSkyB cheif operating officer Richard Freudenstein.
The service which will start "within months" and be paid for via monthy subscriptions, marks a significant leap forward. Currently no major broadcaster offers their entire content live, or in a rolling form, via mobiles.
unhappy with the Standard's "reporting" (which i didn't buy, i found it on a train!) i turned to google! :D
Sky's own page for their current mobile application which is text and image based. I couldn't find an actual press release.
It seems Sky plan to use 3G technology to stream video content to mobile phones. They also have plans to allow control of Sky Plus boxes from mobile phones - something which they really should have done a long time ago...
When i first saw the headline i was hoping that it would be about DVB-H but sadly not. Instead the mobile companies are still flogging the insanely expensive but nonetheless dead horse that is 3G, in spite of there being seemingly superior technologies out there... 3G was never designed for broadcasting: the idea was that we all wanted to make video calls whilst walking down the street. The fact that this is utterly impracticle is of course irrellevant since Vodafone and the like gave the government stupid amounts of money for the bandwidth before realising that people don't need to see each other's ugly mug 24/7.
excuse the rant, i was a little dissapointed after the excitement of the headline.
mark.
They also have plans to allow control of Sky Plus boxes from mobile phones - something which they really should have done a long time ago...
To be honest, that seems far more useful to me than paying sums of money to watch a tiny picture on a phone. Watching it for more than a couple of minutes would be likely to give me eyestrain and armache from holding the phone out front.
I'd be far more willing to buy something along the lines of a portable DVD player (7" screen) with DVB-H receiver. Ideally with the means to easily download content from Sky+ to it's internal memory. Just the job on the train!
...Ideally with the means to easily download content from Sky+ to it's internal memory. Just the job on the train!
are you mad?!?!? they'll never let you do that! imagine the copyright complications!
as for setting a hard drive recorder via my mobile, i could conceivably do that at the moment if i wanted using the wap function on my mobile and setting up a HTPC with a DVB-T card and VLC. Infact, given enough bandwidth at the phone end (perhaps with 3G) i could probably stream the video to the phone as well, but as you say, would i really want to...?
they'll never let you do that! imagine the copyright complications!
Not necessarily. The idea of being able to make a one off copy to a single trusted device, which can't then be copied on, is not a new one. To increase security even further, a paired Sky+ box and portable player could be sold as a package, the Sky+ only able to download to it's own infant player. And to Sky it means not only a higher value sale, but conceivably increasing viewing time and increased advert watching!
advertising was the other thing that was mentioned in the Evening Standard article. With the increase in technology that can bypass avertising breaks (DVD/HDD recorders including Sky+) broadcasters are considering a move to product placement as is fairly common in the USA. Of course product placement is currently not allowed in the UK but the article suggested that OfCom are looking into it. I personally think that by far the most effective TV advertising i've seen recently was during the Ashes. VERY sort breaks of 30-60 seconds gave just enough time to put the kettle on if you wanted to, but not enough that you'd consider channel hopping. Whenever we're watching programmes back on our HDD recorder the only part of the adverts we see are the "sponsored by" stingers at the begining and end of the break. It looks increasingly like shorter (rather than longer as Sky One seem to think) breaks are the way forward for commercial television.