My MobileTV Secret Mission

The word has leaked (http://tinyurl.com/684byd) so I guess I can disclose my top secret trip to Chicago to explore mobileTV – but just don’t tell anyone I told you.

In my experience, all secret missions are fraught with anxiety – this one had its shares of worries. First, I am afraid of heights. Cleaning out the gutters is hair raising for me, so when Mr. X (I am protecting Harris’s Donald Tenhundfeld’s identity with this clever alias) told me to meet him in the coffee shop on the ground floor of the Sears Tower so we could go up to see the only full-time technical trial for mobileTV in the US, I was a little apprehensive. But I wasn’t about to let my phobias stymie me. I mean, what would Bond do?

Mr. X, shook my hand and set a plastic bag with two phones in it on the coffee shop table. “Want to watch some mobileTV?” X asked me. And I got a nervous again.

If you have been reading my blasts lately, you know I have been singing mobileTV’s praises. Not the video services offered by the carriers. For us mobileTV is the distribution of video via broadcast (just like regular TV) to devices like cell phones. In theory, mobileTV is a great idea. The programming would be local – carriers’ versions aren’t. There doesn’t have to be additional charges for the video. And TV stations would gain new channels to distribute programming that might not work on regular TV. But I have to admit that I was not totally objective. UGA bought a TV station and the NMI has convinced the powers that be to give us the spectrum to experiment with mobileTV. Now as X pushed the buttons on the phones marked with the TV icon, I began to wonder what I was going to say if the video sucked.

And there was Babar! Colorful, clear, and smooth. Over coffee, X showed me working mobileTV on two phones – one a sleek touch screen that I have never seen before and the other a cool handset where the screen flipped from portrait to landscape to show video in the proper aspect ratio. X showed me four channels of mobileTV. Two channels were running simulcasts of programming on Chicago FOX affiliates, WPWR and WFLD – a newscast and one of those syndicated “Judge” shows (I think it was Judge Joe Brown). The third channel was a simulcast from the ION Chicago affiliate, WCPX – that was where I saw the Babar the Elephant, the adventurous French cartoon pachyderm (my boys loved his books). The fourth was a channel with a promotional video for the ION network. I was flipping up and down with minimal delay – and it was great – mobileTV actually works! Thank goodness!

X handed me a special ID card and we boarded the first of two elevators to take us to the 102 floor. My ears popped the entire way. When we got off the elevator, we found room-size racks of equipment – and I remembered another fear. “Are we going to have room to house all the technology required for WNEG’s mobileTV?” Then X walked me to a small rack a little bigger than a dorm fridge. “That’s the guts of mobileTV,” he told me. Whew! And some of the equipment like the encoder actually looked familiar.

X made me look out the window – he sensed I was nervous and I think he wanted to have some fun with me. Beautiful and scary at the same time!

Then X asked me if I wanted to take a drive. We headed out of Chicago toward a secret destination where some of the most important work on US mobileTV is taking place. I kind of knew that Zenith was now owned by LG, the Korean company developing a new breed of mobile handsets. But I didn’t know that Zenith’s mobileTV division is headquartered in Licolnshire, about 40 miles north of Chicago. As we sped north on I94, the mobileTV never faltered. And I don’t want to get Mr. X in trouble, but we were zipping along at close to 70MPH! Pretty amazing.

At Zenith, I had a candid chat with some of the people working on mobileTV. Sure, mobile TV in this test iteration looked good and worked well. But I learned that mobileTV still has some sizable hurdles to clear. The biggest being the handset challenge. MobileTV suffers from a real chicken/egg conundrum. Nobody is going to buy the handsets if there isn’t compelling programming. And broadcasters are reluctant to invest in the technology and innovative programming if there isn’t an audience equipped with the handsets.

I looked at the phone I held in my hand. “How much do these phones cost?” I asked X.

“About $10,000,” he answered. I gripped the handset a little tighter. “Those are prototypes and there are only 10 of them in the world. The price won’t come down until we are manufacturing and selling tons of them.” I handed the phone back to him. My iphone has a big dent where I stepped on it – I didn’t want to take chances with a phone that costs as much as a car.

So my secret mission to Chicago was a success and it was reassuring. We are go on mobileTV in Athens. We have a plan to create the Mobile TV Research Testbed (mTVrt) to discover the future of mobileTV. And in just a couple of weeks the NMI capstone class will be showcasing a prototype of their vision for mobileTV complete with a web demo, new types of programming, and a white paper. The students are working feverishly on it in the next room as I type this. We are only inviting in a small group for the students’ presentations but if you are interested in attending let me know.

And stay tuned! I will keep you posted on our progress!