I Don’t Want My MTV

When you want to change channel you’re limited by the dated WAP interface, which makes you go back out to the main menu, and then choose another stream. It’s all painfully slow. And if you do get a decent picture, and you can hear, it’s only at around 15fps and the audio is more often than not out of sync.

So all in all not a great experience.

Then there’s the fact that the phone gets really hot under use. The networks may finally have found something to really stretch all the bandwidth that they’ve got, but doing so pushes the handsets to their limits. It also sucks the juice out of it with Vampiric intensity, so if you want to watch on the go, don’t plan on being too far away from a charger at the end of your journey.

So therefore, I was amazed that the Vodafone's trial had been such a success that people were now willing to fork out a fiver a month for it. Though you now have to pay, the first month is free so I’d thought I’d give it another try. Pleasingly, I found that as long as I was in an area of 3G coverage, I was able to connect first time. However, you still need to have a strong signal – otherwise the grey mush returns. The best picture I got was when standing outside – but why would you want to watch TV standing outside? And again as it was noisy I couldn’t hear anything.

As I said though, a 3G network is hardly the ideal delivery platform for TV. 3G base stations have a finite capacity and it only makes sense to use them now as they are being under utilised. If the service was to become popular it would become a victim of its own success and the service would deteriorate.

However, the recent 02 trial was conducted using an alternative technology - DVB-H. This is the mobile equivalent to DVB-T, that delivers Freeview into our homes and has been ratified as a standard by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). The problem for DVB-H is that it requires radio spectrum, a broadcast network and phones with compatible chips.

As far as the first two are concerned this is happening at different rates. There’s a network trialling it in the States, there’s one in Germany conducting a trial broadcasting the World Cup in Germany and in Italy the network ‘3’ has bought a TV channel, just because it has a DVB-H licence.

In the UK though, forget it, as the spectrum won’t be made available until analogue TV is switched off, and that won’t be finished till 2012. The 02 trial was limited to 400 people and used specially adapted handsets.

BT has also conducted a trial though with yet another technology. The BT Movio service uses DAB-IP, which uses the DAB spectrum and enables modified handsets to watch TV and DAB radio. However, BT found that move people in the trial ended up listening to radio on the move than watching TV.

It’s struck me then that this is a technology that would make more sense if it served a need, rather than being one that is essentially marketing led. If my phone can pick up TV or a TV-like video stream then fine, but until the service matures with superior picture and sound quality and interface, I’m not going to be willing to pay for it and I suspect many others won’t either.