Live TV coming to the iPhone…possibly AT&T?

  • February 16, 2009 5:50 pm

orb-live-tv-on-iphone

The iPhone has been since day one, marketed as a mobile multimedia device.  Everything from audio, to pictures, to video has been touted as the iPhones main bread and butter.  It comes as somewhat of a surprise then that still the iPhone doesn’t have live TV.  One would think that with such a wide and active developer base, surely a live TV app had to be in development.  Let’s take a small step back for a moment.  The iPhone 3G is by far AT&T’s biggest most profitible phone in their entire history.  With such an emphasis on web content and multimedia web content one can quickly understand that coupled with the sheer number of users and what those users are doing online on their iPhones has tested AT&T’s fragile network to the brink of collapse several times.  Still in some areas latency is horrendous as are download speeds.  That is the one key reason live TV hasn’t made it’s way to the iPhone.  The second reason I believe is that AT&T obviously wants in on some of the money and won’t let Apple sell a live TV iPhone app unless AT&T has some control.  That however is all about to change…

PacketVideo, a division of NextWave Wireless has annoucned that the public should “expect to see a major wireless carrier launch a live TV app for the iPhone dubbed “PacketVideo within the next 6-8 weeks”.  They don’t state which carrier would be launching the service, however, if the app does come to the U.S. at launch or ever, AT&T will obviously be the carrier as they are the only *Apple Certified* iPhone carrier in the U.S.  The PacketVideo service would be AT&T’s third mobile TV service as they already sell the “MobiTV” service and Qualcomm’s “FloTV” for several of their other phones.  The other two services aren’t available to the iPhone because they companies either haven’t created an app for it (MobiTV), or in the case of Qualcomm’s FloTV, a special chip is required that isn’t present in the iPhone which means the only option will be the PacketVideo service.

PacketVideo will have an uphill battle from the start however as only 2.1% of people subscribe to and watch mobile TV.  Personally, I’m not a big TV fan.  I’m a news person.  And all of the news whether it be tech related or politcal related I get it all from the internet because TV news is always skewed and biased.  Really you watch stories on TV and get the real news online.  That’s again my opinion.  What do you think?  One thing is for certain, if AT&T does in fact pick up a live TV app/service for the iPhone they will have at least a few takers.  Will you bite and start watching mobile TV?  Between AT&T’s unreliable network and the iPhones terrible battery live (even worse when streaming live TV over 3g) will it even be worth it?  Sound off below.

Source: Alley Insider


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  • Troy

    I hate to link to another site, but it looks like MobiTV has made a similar announcement today, too. http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/32683/MWC-MobiTV-adds-iPhone-support

  • Troy

    There are more obstacles to launching a live television app than the 3G network. The iPhone just doesn’t support out of the box live video streaming like other phones. Audio, as we can see with Pandora, AOL Radio, I <3 Radio, etc., is simple. Video? Not so much. Why Apple would create a multimedia device like the iPhone and make delivering streaming video a pain in the arse is beyond me. It’s not impossible, but just not as easy as creating a Java-based RTSP stream capable app on any other handset in the market. Maybe Apple did it on purpose, but then again progressive download works fine. Who knows.

    • Gadget God

      We can all agree that Apple has definitely botched some key moves and withheld some key features that have kept the iPhone from being the ultimate phone.

  • Gib

    As mentioned above, the 3G network isn’t the best as well as coupled with the battery life of the current iPhone, I can picture some real unhappy customers. If I had an iPhone, would I try it out, probably.