At the recent Mobile World Congress, Telegent and Brightstar announced their partnership to launch a "soccer TV" phone, the Avvio 505, enabling African and Latin American soccer fans to view live free-to-air broadcasts of World Cup 2010 in plenty of time for the games through retailers in both continents. The soccer phone, emblazoned with customized colors and flags of nations participating in the cup, incorporates Telegent's free-to-air analog mobile TV receiver. As well as voice, SMS, TV and FM radio, the device features a 2in screen, measures 43mm x 101mm x 13.3mm and delivers 240 minutes of continuous talk time. The TV and FM radio features provide consumers with one-button mobile access to live, free-to-air analog TV and radio broadcasts.
Speaking of the World Cup, Mirics’ FlexiTV software-based global TV receiver was chosen by Hong Kong-based USmart to develop multistandard broadcast TV platforms targeting notebook computers, very much in order to bring live World Cup soccer action to portable PCs, with production timed to target World Cup fans on TV in Europe, Asia and South America, regions widely served by the DVB-T and ISDB-T digital TV standards. USmart demonstrated the FlexiTV-enabled products at CeBIT in Hannover last month.
Streambox Live and Sprint partnered for a new way to capture the news. Detroit’s WDIV-TV’s coverage of heavy snowstorm conditions involved streaming weather and traffic images from smartphones mounted on the dashboards of county snowplow trucks, quickly dubbed “snowplow cams,” thanks to Streambox Live for Instant Transport via the Sprint network. Later, major news players including CNN Headline News, MSNBC and The Weather Channel picked this coverage up to enhance their own national weather coverage.
IPVision recently chose TV Genius to enhance the functionality of TV listings on IPVision’s FetchTV service with search and relevant recommendation on Web, mobile and hybrid TV services. FetchTV offers more than 50 channels through the Freeview UK DTT service, PVR functionality, a comprehensive library of more than 2000 hours of VOD content and over-the-top content from the BBC iPlayer, with the Sky Player service available soon.
