[Air-l] Mobile TV

[A.C.Roibas at bton.ac.uk]

Hi Shani,

This is a quite tricky issue. As you know many companies in Europe, Canada,
Korea and the USA are launching what they call 'mobile TV' but at the end it
is just broadcast of TV channels. 

I am doing research about this issue (first with Vodafone and then BT) and
I've found out that there are reasons that might undermine the success of
such operation. The first one is related to the intrinsic physical diversity
between both interfaces (TV and handhelds) making them unsuitable for the
same way of delivering of content. The second regards the context of use: TV
is traditionally used in a domestic private environment and usually involves
a social sharing while mobile phones are mainly used in public environments,
entail an individual experience and generally the is much shorter. Moreover,
unlike TV, handhelds are regularly used in different situations and with
different purposes and they are likely to be used as an auxiliary tool to
assist users' in a main activity (in this sense, mobile content could be
related to the specific context of the user - context awareness). Finally,
there are also operability differences: TV (including interactive TV) is
considered a passive or low interactive medium while handhelds entail a high
interactivity and connectivity... So, broadcasting of TV programs on
handhelds is likely to be as deluding as interactive TV was. In other words,
mobile TV will be something else and will have to do with issues such as
socialibility, context awareness, creativity, interactivity, convergence (as
you say: iTV, mobile & Internet) and connectivity (one to one and one to
many).

We are organizing a workshop and a SIG at CHI 2006 in order to generate
discussion and share research experiences and case-studies about this topic
[http://soc.kuleuven.be/com/mediac/chi2006workshop/index.htm].

Regards,

Anxo

---------------------------------------------------------- 
Dr. Anxo Cereijo Roibás, 
School of Computing, Mathematical 
& Information Sciences 
Faculty of Management & Information Sciences 
University of Brighton 
Watts Building, Moulsecoomb 
Brighton BN2 4GJ, United Kingdom 
t +44(0)1273 64 2458 
f +44(0)1273 64 2405 
m +44(0)7814 491790 
http://www.cmis.brighton.ac.uk/staff/anxo/

I am seeking recommendations for readings on mobile TV. This may seem
slightly off-topic, as this is not a directly Internet-related topic.
However, with the increasing trend towards the convergence of technology, it
becomes harder to make a distinction between Internet and new media and so I
believe this is not that off-topic after all and may be of interest to
others on the list.  

If you've come across interesting studies on early adopters, interviews with
people in the industry or anything you think may be relevant, I'd be
grateful if you could email me your recommendations offlist and I will post
a summary to the list.

Thanks for your help, 

Shani 

********************************** 
Shani Orgad, PhD 
Department of Media and Communications 
London School of Economics and Political Science 
Houghton Street 
London WC2A 2AE 
United Kingdom 
e-mail: s.s.orgad at lse.ac.uk 
tel: +44 20 79556493 
fax: +44 20 79557248 
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/shaniorgad
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/shaniorgad>