More Details On Mobile Satellite TV Project

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the now-this-is-making-some-sense... dept

Last month, I thought Samsung was spending a bit too much time working on features no one wanted when they decided to add satellite TV receiving capabilities to a new mobile phone. Now, however, more details are coming out about the project. As Derek added at the time, they’re weren’t just setting up a phone that could view DirecTV, but it was designed to work with a new mobile satellite TV project that SK Telecom is launching next month. The idea is to create a specific mobile TV service in Korea that will beam 39 channels of content down to mobile phones and other mobile devices – including in-car TVs. Since it’s one way, they’re also hoping to tie that service to the 3G wireless services (already popular in Korea) for upstream interactivity. While I still have some skepticism about the project, this is starting to make a lot more sense – especially since it’s likely to avoid some of the “poor quality” problems of other mobile TV solutions. Even if just for in-car TV sets, you could see at least some market for the offering. Adding in true interactivity would be nice – but so-called “interactive TV” with broadcast downstream and data upstream never seems to catch on. However, the concerns are that any satellite related venture is extremely expensive, and it’s difficult to make up those initial capital expenditures. Already, they’re saying that the devices equipped to receive this mobile TV will be quite expensive (at least at the beginning) which can slow down adoption unless companies are willing to take a bath to seed the market. More importantly, though, I wonder about the demand that people have for mobile TV – especially in the age of time-shifting TiVo. Suddenly, viewing live TV seems less important to many people. If this type of device had TiVo-like qualities and the ability to interface with a home TV, it might be more interesting. This is especially true because the person on the go is probably a lot more likely to be interrupted while watching, or finish his or her journey in the middle of whatever he or she was watching. Of course, maybe there’s even more to this project than is being explained right now, but it doesn’t sound like they’re going in the TiVo direction just yet, and so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.