Mediaphy introduces chip for streaming mobile TV
If you’ve been waiting for technology that lets you watch streaming digital broadcast television programming on your phone, MediaPhy has some good news.
The San Jose semiconductor company is announcing a new chip that it says can be used to watch digital broadcasting on any mobile device with an LCD and an MPEG Decoder across multiple mobile TV standards in different countries, while using far less power than existing chips in the market.
By working on a variety of mobile TV standards, including DVB-H, ISDB-T and T-DMB/DAB, the company wants to help partner companies develop basic designs that could be productized in markets where the demand for mobile TV is growing fastest.
It envisions a near-infinite number of places the chip could help people watch TV, not just on phones — TV on laptops, gaming consoles, cameras, GPS systems, on TV sets in cars, etc. It is currently working with mobile handset manufacturers and suppliers of module devices, such as USB-based plugins, to begin production (generic sample image via).
The company is targeting markets in Asia and Europe that already have growing mobile TV services, looking for its more efficient chips to give it a competitive advantage against more established competitors.
Japan, for example, has seen strong adoption of mobile TV based on its ISDB-T standard, with over 6.5 million mobile TV enabled handsets going to market in the first half of 2007 — a 600 percent annual growth rate, according to a Japanese industry study. Japan will be the largest mobile TV market through 2011, according to a study put out by The Linley Group.
MediaPhy’s biggest risk, however, may be TV viewers spending more time on the internet, where they can interact with each other instead of just watching programming. This trend has been noted for years, most recently in a study by IBM.
It is also unclear how high the demand will be for the chip from handset manufacturers and vendors, as EETimes notes. Mobile service providers also have complex roaming agreements in place just for voice, just within a country, the article adds — a problem in the US. In many other markets, most television and radio broadcasts are sent unencrypted so any receiving device can play them (more ).
Competitors with similar technology include Newport Media Inc., Siano Mobile Silicon and DiBcom SA.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.