Mobile television - technology and user experiences: Report on the Mobile-TV project

Watching television from a wireless pocket-sized terminal or phone is interesting in many situations. Public and private transportation vehicles and public places are potential environments for mobile television services. Even in homes, mobile television handsets are interesting, both as a personal television set and as a tool to establish a closer interaction with the television programs. In addition to these possibilities for enriching viewer experience, mobile television offers the broadcaster new audiences, the teleoperators a new distribution channel and the equipment manufacturer new receiver product possibilities. In fact, television is the only major media missing from today ́s mobile phones. In this study we empirically investigated people ́s real interest in mobile television by interviewing a large population and by building and trialling a prototype system. The system combines several types of wireless networks in a 4G fashion. It takes digital terrestrial television broadcasts from the air and delivers them over the Internet to mobile terminals in hot-spot areas covered by Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). Content is also delivered over the GPRS cellular network. Two types of terminals are used – a pocket-sized PDA and an A5-sized tablet PC. The digital television signal is transcoded down to a bit rate suiting these terminals. In the field trial the user could watch almost the complete program content of the three leading Finnish TV channels. The user could also access all programs transmitted during the previous week from the media server (TV-Anytime feature). Ordinary families, leisure users, workers and students participated in the trial. Each user tried the service at WLAN hot-spots during one month. The users clearly considered the service to be television, not wireless multimedia. This underlines that new services should be rooted in known user interfaces. The most liked feature was the ability to watch programs from the archive whenever the individual wanted. Typically, the user surfed through the program lists and