Demand For Mobile TV To Outpace Infrastructure, Says Broadcast International

There’s a threat to Placeshifting—the ability to watch video content anywhere from any device including, cell phones and PDA’s.

According to Rod Tiede, CEO Broadcast International, a company specializing in video compression technology, the placeshifting market will be stifled, despite strong user demand, by an inadequate infrastructure. This is especially true in the U.S. where much of the wireless infrastructure is still analog.

“Applications such as placeshifting and mobile social networking are very much in demand by users,” he said. The problem is too little available bandwidth. It simply won’t support the pricing models, the image quality nor the raw quantity of video required without a major change in video compression technology or a multibillion-dollar infrastructure overhaul.”

In the executive overview of an April 2007 report by Multimedia Research Group titled “Mobile TV: Global Standards Review & Forecast for Infrastructure and Handsets,” it was reported that 60-85 percent of participants in a study were keen to purchase a video-enabled handset when they were shown the high-quality video service possible on the devices.

“The market for video-enabled cell phones is poised to explode, but the infrastructure for delivering high-quality video to those small screens needs to change,” Tiede added. “Video is extremely bandwidth-intensive; right now, the chokepoint in the infrastructure is video compression technology. Currently, video viewing over wireless devices requires at least 300K in bandwidth. That number needs to come down by close to 80 percent in order to make video delivery to cell phones practical and cost-effective for large numbers of viewers.”