LG Introduces Phone With Free TV
Is the next big thing free TV on your cell phone? It just might come about -- if Korean giant LG has anything to do with it.
According to a
Reuters
report, LG just introduced a handset that will allow you to watch new, over-the-air digital broadcast TV channels on your phone without having to pay your cell-phone company a monthly fee.
This new technology threatens to remove cellular-phone operators (
AT&T
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,
Verizon
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,
Sprint
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) from what could become a very lucrative mobile TV business in the future.
The LG HB620T phone taps straight into existing TV broadcasts, which means that operators could lose out on broadcast revenue from services streamed over 3G and 4G networks or on dedicated mobile broadcasting platforms.
Newly designed phones use the digital television signal being broadcast for TV sets, known as DVB-T. This is a new standard facing an already fragmented mobile TV market.
Nokia
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and other European interests (including the European Commission) are pushing DVB-H, while Asian and U.S. vendors have pushed technologies like DMB and
Qualcomm's
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MediaFLO.
Qualcomm describes its system as an "ecosystem with a highly scalable global and open mobile entertainment platform with the highest content capacity combined with a visually compelling mobile experience."
We caught up with Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs on the floor of the CTIA cell phone show in Las Vegas last month, and asked him about his company's
MediaFLO technology
.
In the future, these other mobile TV platforms may be bypassed by consumers if other technologies will be able to provide us with digital television programming on our cell phones -- with no additional monthly subscription charges.
Analysts believe DVB-T could threaten other mobile TV alternatives. "This poses a new challenge for a business which faces too many challenges already," Jari Honko, an analyst with eQ Bank, told
Reuters
.
Yannick Levy, head of French mobile TV chip manufacturer DiBcom, told the news agency that: "We think this is going to be a trend in Europe."
Neil Mawston, an analyst at Strategy Analytics, told
Reuters
that mobile DVB-T was a threat to the dedicated mobile TV network format in Europe and parts of Asia "because it gives operators another reason to delay" introducing the format.
Reuters says the LG handset has already gone on sale in Germany, and a similar model (the T600) from Taiwanese vendor Gigabyte is also in the launch phase.
Gary Krakow is TheStreet.com's senior technology correspondent.