Illustration: Gordon StuderAs a rule I try to avoid watching too much television. But in a world where every bar, restaurant, hotel, and airport has an idiot box blaring in the corner, this is harder than it sounds. And with live TV coming to cars, computers, and cell phones in the near future, there may be no escape.
"Very soon, many mobile devices will indeed have TVs," predicts Mark Bunger, principal analyst for Forrester Research in San Francisco. "Not just your phone and car, but your keychain too."
Mobile TV is already finding its way to portable PCs. For a fee of $10 monthly or $80 annually, Orb Networks, formerly known as AllMiMedia (see my July 2004 Gadget Freak column, "Lost in Transmission"), lets you log on to the Net from a handheld, notebook, or cell phone and access TV shows you've recorded on your Windows Media Center PC or, soon, on your Windows XP computer. Sling Media's Slingbox is similarly empowered (see "TV on the Run" below).
But the real TV action is in cell phones. Every major cell phone maker and carrier is working on a scheme to deliver TV content to your handset. The folks at Philips Semiconductors anticipate that in a few years half of all handsets--that's more than 300 million worldwide--will come with TV chips. Cell carriers love the idea because these subscription services are yet another means to separate customers from their money. But will anyone else love mobile TV?
Dial and Error
If you subscribe to Cingular, Midwest Cellular, or Sprint PCS, you may already be able to get live television on your cell phone. For $10 per month, MobiTV serves 25 live channels, among them ABC, C-SPAN, Country Music Channel, Discovery Channel, Fashion TV, NBC, Toon World, and Vegas Sports. The service works on more than 30 phone models, including the Motorola Razr V3, Nokia 6620, and Samsung A700. Other compatible carriers and phones should be available by the time you read this.
Using MobiTV isn't much like surfing from your couch, however. The sound can be garbled and the video choppy. I was lucky to get 10 frames per second on my Samsung A700 phone (standard video is 30 fps); older mobiles may manage only a single frame per second. The picture was so fuzzy, I had a hard time distinguishing between Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, and there was a 5-to-15-second lag when changing channels--something that would quickly drive an obsessive channel surfer like me insane.
Worse, watching television will drain your cell phone's batteries in about 2 to 3 hours. And while you're watching, all your calls will go straight to voice mail, which wipes out the whole reason for carrying a cell phone.
The performance problems will likely evaporate as bigger-bandwidth networks get built. High-speed 3G cellular networks are slowly coming on line, but when one will reach your neck of the woods is anyone's guess. And though a 1-inch-tall Shania Twain is not something I really need in my pocket, I can see mobile TV appealing to sports and news junkies who can't wait to get home to watch the highlights, as well as to weary commuters trying to kill time on the train.
Still, the gadget I long for is TV-B-Gone, a $15 dingus that lets you turn off any television with just a single click. Then again, if everyone has a TV set on their phone or handheld, maybe those public televisions will go away. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
If you have TiVo separation anxiety when you travel, Sling Media's Slingbox Personal Broadcaster offers relief. The $249 Slingbox, available about the time you read this, connects to your cable box, satellite receiver, or digital video recorder and streams your TV programs to a PC anywhere in the world. Right now the device can use only a Wi-Fi connection, but later on it will also utilize high-speed cellular networks for streaming to a cell phone. You'll even be able to access your DVR's interface from your PC and select any recorded programming for viewing in your hotel room or at a café.
Contributing Editor Dan Tynan watches a little TV (literally).
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