Virgin Mobile has signed up for
BT’s Movio broadcast digital TV and
radio service for mobile phones, a deal that will
apparently make it the first carrier in the world to
offer IP packetbased TV on the tiny screen using
standard Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB)
technology.
“Virgin Mobile customers will be the first people
in Europe to watch real broadcast TV over their
mobile phones. It’s not downloaded it’s not looped
it’s real TV just like you get at home, and it’s
real DAB digital radio crystal clear sound,”
bragged Graeme Hutchinson, Virgin Mobile’s sales and
marketing director.
The deal is also key for BT Movio, which at first
will dish up five TV channels and 350 digital radio
stations nationwide broadcasting twentyfour hours a
day. BT Movio is one of the first wholesale TV
offering of its kind in Europe. Eventually it will
be available to all mobile operators in the UK, but
for an undisclosed limited time Virgin gets
exclusive rights. In part that’s because the Virgin
service, which will go live later this year, will
work at first on only a single handset called the
Trilogy – touted as the world’s first DABIP capable
handset and unveiled at the 3GSM World Congress in
Barcelona this week.
The Trilogy was designed by BT, The
Technology Partnership (TTP), a UK
technology firm, and Taiwanese mobile handset
manufacturer HTC. It runs on
Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 5.0
operating system.
With the mobile TV market beginning to heat up in
the U.K. Orange, Vodafone
and 3 already stream TV channels
over 3G mobile networks although that type of
service tends to eat up bandwidth – Virgin is
clearly trying to get an edge in the emerging
market. Virgin claims that, in a trial with BT, if
found people would actually watch TV on the tiny
screen for an average of more than an hour per week
and that most would pay up to $14 a month for the
privilege.
Virgin, BT and Microsoft tout DABIP both because
it supports IP and uses DAB infrastructure, which
means a faster and cheaper time to market that for
carriers using the rival DVBH system, which
requires building new infrastructure. In addition to
IPbased video and radio, the system supports other
standard broadband applications – for instant
Microsoft has versions of both its Internet Explorer
browser and instant messaging software built into
Windows Mobile.
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