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Will ping you when I do.
Nice post.
Analog TV shutdown kills free cell-phone TV
Most phones sold in Japan can tune in to free TV broadcasts, and there are tens of millions of viewers. Cell phones that can tune in to free broadcasts are also available in South Korea, Germany and China.
But only 3 percent of Americans regularly watched video on their cell phones late last year, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That figure includes people who watched short, downloaded clips rather than broadcast TV.
For starters, you can blame the impending shutdown of all full-power analog TV broadcasts on Feb. 17, a deadline set by the government. That Chinese handset, made by ZTE Corp., can only tune in to analog transmissions. Because most of them are going away, there's no real point in selling phones like that in the United States.
China is keeping its analog broadcasts until 2015, six years longer than the U.S., so the phones are viable there. Ironically, the TV reception chip inside comes from a U.S. company, Telegent Systems Inc., based in Sunnyvale, Calif.
The analog U.S. broadcasts are being replaced by digital broadcasts, but there are no phones anywhere that can tune in to those.
When the U.S. digital TV standard was laid down in the early '90s by the Advanced Television Systems Committee, it was optimized for high-definition signals to stationary antennas, according to Mark Richter, president of the industry group.
At the time, cell phones had screens that could display eight digits and nothing else, so little thought was given making the broadcasts work with mobile gadgets.
The Europeans created their digital television standard later and made it a bit more amenable to mobile reception, Richter said. Thus, there are now phones sold in Germany that can receive local digital broadcasts intended for stationary TVs.
Weijie Yun, Telegent's chief executive, said it's theoretically possible to receive U.S. digital terrestrial broadcasts on a phone, but engineers have yet to overcome key technical challenges. For now, Telegent's chips can receive analog broadcasts in most countries of the world, and digital broadcasts in Europe and a few countries outside it.
I can't help but politely disagree with this statement. It seems to me that the problem is not our attitude toward the technology, but rather our attitude toward the companies that are producing our phones for us. We are willing to accept what they have, even though we know that they could be producing better phones.
I live in America and the article is speaking from a UK standpoint, but I believe that both our countries are experiencing the same problem. The companies that sell phones have no need to give you everything at once. Consumers have shown they are more than willing to shell out good money for a phone that isn't on the cutting edge of technology, so they have no need to give you everything at once. Features pile on each other at a trickle pace so that the newest phone is obsolete in the shortest amount of time possible, while keeping plenty of advanced features in queue for newer phones when the technology is perfected and cheaper. Every time a new feature is released, a fresh wave of phone purchases generates.
All of that being said, I prefer to wander about without attachment to a gadget or massive social network, and always will. I find myself unwilling to ignore the physical world around me and all of it's sensory input.