Thanks to a new chip from Texas Instruments, cell phone users may never have to miss a TV show. The new chip will capture broadcast signals and allow cell phone users to watch live broadcasts.
Marketers, creative directors and advertisers may soon have a new medium to narrowcast digital signage campaigns directly to potential customers.
Texas Instruments recently developed the wireless industry's first digital TV on a single chip for cell phones. The chip will capture broadcast signals and allow cell phone users to watch live broadcasts ranging from their favorite reality TV shows to major sporting events and breaking news. Code-named "Hollywood," the chip will receive live digital TV broadcasts using new television infrastructure that is being developed for cell phones, doing for cell phones what HDTV did for home TVs.
Hollywood will join TI´s current suite of consumer device technology, which includes its DLP technology and its signal processing and analog technology for such products as digital still cameras, audio players and digital radio.
The digital TV chip will support newly established and open digital TV broadcast standards for the wireless industry. While no single standard will be used worldwide, TI said the most prevalent standards will be those that are open and non-proprietary, including digital video broadcasting-handheld (DVB-H), which was developed for Europe and is expected to extend to North America, and the Japanese specification, integrated services digital broadcasting-terrestrial (ISDB-T). Hollywood will support DVB-H and ISDB-T.
Dedicated wireless networks supporting these standards will feature high-quality live broadcast TV (24fps-30fps) paired with full audio to offer a more robust mobile viewing experience versus the 1fps-15fps streaming capability offered via cellular. In the future, these networks may potentially support services once reserved for the living room for use on the cell phone, including pay-per-view programming, interactive television and menu/guide systems.
For more information, visit http://focus.ti.com.
