Nokia to bring digital television to mobile phones by 2006

Test users ready to pay for programmes

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Already mobile viewers can watch for example TV news bulletins on their handsets, but within two years as many as twenty different TV channels may be made available.
      At the ninth Nokia Mobility Conference, which opened yesterday in Monaco, Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's Executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia, shed some light on Nokia's vision of the future of mobile multimedia.
     
According to Vanjoki, in 2006 Nokia will introduce a mobile phone with a built-in digital TV receiver. Yesterday the company revealed their latest model, where a separate TV card is used to make viewing of TV programmes possible.
      Nokia is currently testing the mobile phone TV in Helsinki and Oxford. Testing in the United States will soon commence in collaboration with network operators Crown Castle.
      The most extensive test phase to date has just ended in Berlin, where testers viewed programmes on their handsets 3 to 15 minutes per day. They also expressed a willingness to pay something like 13 euros per month for this pleasure.
     
Director Seppo Sutela of Nokia Ventures believes that charges on programmes viewed on mobile handsets will vary from country to country, depending on the chosen operations model.
      The pay-per-view principle will almost certainly be an option.
      Research and development is still very much under way on mobile phone TVs. A division of labour is being negotiated with television companies, mobile phone operators, and network owners.
      Final endorsement of the DVB-H standard supported by Nokia is still hanging in the air. There may be competing standards waiting in the wings. Transmission frequencies for mobile TV have not yet been allocated. They could well be auctioned at some point as was the case with the 3G licences at the turn of the millennium.
      Nevertheless, Nokia aims to develop its mobile TV into a global solution.
     
Vanjoki also presented other ways of transferring TV programmes on mobile devices. Already media content can be downloaded on mobile phones during the night when the use of the network is low.
      Within the next two years Nokia will introduce a handset with a built-in hard drive for added memory capacity. The South Korean manufacturer Samsung already launched their version earlier this autumn.
      The three new handsets also introduced by the Finnish company yesterday in Monaco were the Nokia 7710 widescreen multimedia smartphone, the Nokia 3230 1.3 megapixel camera smartphone, and the business-oriented Nokia 6020 "Simply Essential" camera phone. All are scheduled to come into stores in the first quarter of 2005.


Links:
  Nokia Mobility Conference 2004
  Nokia Phones

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