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This week, Orlando hosted CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association) 2007, which has been described as “the Super Bowl of mobile conferences.” One of the top forecasted trends for mobile phones is mobile TV. Subscribers of mobile TV are able to watch specially-formatted television programs on their mobile phone screen that are delivered over the cellular network. Mobile TV is streamed over 3G or GPRS networks. DVB-H creates a true broadcast transmission, such as digital satellite, and works best on devices that have low battery consumption, such as cell phones. DVB-H is not found everywhere, but is gradually becoming more and more available. Mobile TV has been available in international markets since the early part of the 2000′s, and will now be coming to the American market.
Qualcomm announced at CTIA that they have rolled out their new Mobile TV technology in the US, which will bring television to cellular phone screens. Currently, Verizon Wireless is the only US carrier to sell television service on cellular phones with their new VCAST Mobile TV service debuting on March 1st.
Will mobile TV come with captioning? I haven’t seen mobile TV in action myself, but here is what I have found so far:
- I discovered that a company called SDI Mobile provides subtitling services for mobile TV.
- Envivio makes a mobile TV encoder called 4Caster C4 that comes with EIA 608 closed captioning, DVB Teletext, Subtitling and VBI pass through.
Verizon’s VCAST mobile TV service currently can only be displayed on the following two phones: the Samsung SCH-U620 and the LG VX9400. However, I can’t find anything that says these phones display closed captions. I’ll contact Verizon and find out the status of their mobile TV service and captions.
If anyone is planning on going to the Mobile TV World Forum in London next month, please talk to the vendors about closed captioning and encourage them to bring subtitling and/or captioning to mobile TV.
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