Snow will be the new screen candy on mobile phones, since there are few options for broadcasting content to phones: place shifting, one-to-one, one-to-many, and RF broadcast. RF broadcast, good old TV without cable, appears to be the most likely distribution mechanism, since with the digital broadcast, only a few simultaneous streams per cell can be transmitted. And with such a tiny device, there's not much of an antenna. Ergo, snow. Presentations from Informa Telecoms, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments informed this entry.

Mark Burk, a Research Analyst at Informa Telecoms, suggested that handsets for mobile TV will cost $150 more than existing 3G handsets. He said that 43% of the cost to consumers for mobile TV will be the handset for the 18-month period of the typical contract. He also said that consumers were willing to spend $10-15 per month for these services. I ask, what’s Mark been smoking?

Place shifting is the technical name for video podcasting, as users would choose what programs to watch and simply download them to their phones. This choice is a bandwidth constraint that will ultimately fail, unless it’s done through a USB cable or Bluetooth/WiFi to the home or work broadband connection.

One-to-one and one-to-many are cellular transmission of mobile content. This strategy could fail, since cellular sites can at most handle three or four simultaneous broadcasts, even with EVDO Rev. A and HSDPA deployments.

Broadcast using radio frequency (RF) technology will turn mobile phones into television receivers, giving them two radios. This concept makes the most sense, as it doesn’t impact the cellular network in any way. The challenge here is broadcast quality and spectrum allocation, both of which will be tremendous issues. The program guide and other content will stream via the cellular network. I see snow on screens in the future—isn’t that a step backward?

The program guide can also combine the three broadcast methods, not necessarily even indicating which is in use. The biggest usability challenge stated by all of the speakers is the channel change time, which is longer than three seconds.

Paul Scanlan, COO & Co-Founder of MobiTV spoke about the future of mobile TV.

2004: <1 FPS with MJPEG, then 5-7 FPS with MJPEG, GPRS & 1X-RTT
2005: 12-17 FPS, MPEG, GPRS/EDGE/EVDO
2006: 15-30 FPS, MPEG, UMTS/EVDO

I’m looking forward to 2007. MobiTV has a new, sexy program guide (EPG), which has up-sell area above the programming content, which they showed on the Sprint service. While watching content, they scroll up-sell opportunities for ring tones, voting (using premium SMS), and what appears to be sponsorship banner ads.

MobiTV monitors the broadcast traffic, down to each cell site. The Michael Jackson verdict was the most popular day in their history.

MobiTV believes in WiMAX as the future.

Cost Implications of Mobile TV & Video
David Carey, President and CTO of Portelligent gave a fascinating presentation about the cost implications of mobile TV and video on handsets. It seems to be about $60 for the Bill of Materials, though Mark Burk earlier said $150 to the end user. Portelligent creates "tear down" studies of handsets, where they "kill them gently," taking them apart and lovingly photographing every aspect of the design. The biggest costs didn't appear to be the chips, but the complicated double hinging mechanisms for the displays.