Mobile television

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Mobile television is television watched on a small handheld or mobile device, typically developed for that purpose. It includes service delivered via mobile phone networks, received free-to-air via terrestrial television stations, or via satellite broadcast. Regular broadcast standards or special mobile TV transmission formats can be used. Additional features include downloading TV programs and podcasts from the Internet and storing programming for later viewing.

According to the Harvard Business Review, the growing adoption of smartphones allowed users to watch as much mobile video in three days of the 2010 Winter Olympics as they watched throughout the entire 2008 Summer Olympics, a five-fold increase.^[1] However, except in South Korea, consumer acceptance of broadcast mobile TV has been limited due to lack of compatible devices.^[2]

Early mobile TV receivers were based on old analog television systems. They were the earliest televisions that could be placed in a coat pocket. The first was the Panasonic IC TV MODEL TR-001, introduced in 1970. The second was sold to the public by Clive Sinclair in January 1977. It was called the Microvision or the MTV-1. It had a two-inch (50 mm) CRT screen and was also the first television that could pick up signals in multiple countries. It measured 4.0 inches (100 mm) x 6.25 inches (159 mm) × 1.6 inches (41 mm) and was sold for less than £100 in the UK and for around $400 in the United States. The project took over ten years to develop and was funded by around £1.6 million in British government grants.^[3][4]

In 2002, South Korea was the first country to introduce commercial mobile TV via 2G CDMA IS95-C, and 3G (CDMA2000 1X EVDO) networks.^[5] In 2005, South Korea became the first country to broadcast satellite mobile TV via DMB (S-DMB) on May 1, and terrestrial DMB (T-DMB) on December 1. South Korea and Japan are developing the sector.^[6] Mobile TV services were launched in Hong Kong during March 2006 by the operator CSL on the 3G network.^[7] BT launched mobile TV in the United Kingdom in September 2006, although the service was abandoned less than a year later.^[8] Germany had a failed endeavor with MFD Mobiles Fernsehen Deutschland, who launched their DMB-based service June 2006 in Germany, but ended it in April 2008.^[9] Also in June 2006, mobile operator 3 in Italy (part of Hutchison Whampoa) launched their mobile TV service, but in contrast to Germany's MFD it was based on the European DVB-H standard.^[10] In the US Verizon Wireless and AT&T offered MediaFLO, a subscription service from March 2007 until March 2011.

In the 2010s, specialised mobile TV platforms and protocols have been discontinued with the rapid deployment of LTE cellular network and rising popularity of streaming television over the internet from modern smartphones.^{[11][12][13][14]}