From picturephonig.com I learned of an article in E-Media Tidbits that reports Telefonica Movil in Chile is offering television broadcasts to cellular phones that have the capacity to accept them.
Reading those entries, plus using Google's Spanish-to-English translation service to read a press release on Telefonica's Web site and an article in El Mercurio, I got a fairly good "picture' of the TV service. You'll get more information if you understand Spanish!
Telefonica Movil TV is available now for the Sony Ericsson P900, Nokia 3650 and Nokia N-Gage and will be available for the Nokia 6200 when it's introduced in a few weeks.
Multimedia services
The cellular operator is promoting 24-hour-a-day TV service to your handset. The press release promotes sports programs -- national and international matches -- such as soccer, tennis and "formula 1" (car racing?).
El Mercurio says (assuming I have understood the Google translation) the service will include trailers of movies and TV programs. In addition, Telefonica Movil offers free access (except for GPRS packet charges) to Webcams in Paris and New York.
In the future, the cellular operator would like to offer live cameras showing current traffic conditions in Chile.
User-hostile pricing
The service employs RealONE over Television Nacional and costs about $.01 per KB to download videos and $.005 for streaming videos.
Kilobytes? I hate charges for data based upon kilobytes. No one knows how much data he/she is using and you never know exactly how much you're getting charged -- until you get the bill.
This is user-hostile pricing and the TV service could get very expensive if you don't keep track of your time. I realize that if the videos are very brief, the charges could be reasonable.
Performance problems
However, subscribers will indeed want to download longer videos -- whether it's real-time streaming or archived files -- and per-KB pricing is expensive and confusing. Of course, consumer acceptance also is dependent upon the quality of the content and the performance of the network.
Telefonica Movil employs WAP over GSM GPRS. That means it is s-l-o-w and not likely to provide a particularly great user experience.
Unlike some analysts, I haven't immediately discounted the value of real-time streaming and downloading achived video to cellular phones. But if the content, price and network performance aren't good enough, the service will fail.
More cellular TV in Chile
From a comment on E-Media Tidbits I read that "a second cellular TV service is being introduced in Chile (see below) -- by Entrel PCS.
Like Telefonica Movil TV, the Entel PCS TV service uses WAP and GSM. The Nokia 3650 and Nokia N-Gage phones are compatible with Entel's service.
Philippine mobile carrier Globe Telecom implemented a similar service, called myGlobe G-TV, with a similar billing scheme, in late February or early March.
More details here: http://www.myglobe.com.ph/portal/featdetails.asp?title=features&contentid=1037
Posted by: Paul | Thursday, April 01, 2004 at 09:24 PM