O2 and its parent Telefonica have always planned to introduce mobile TV using the new broadcast technology DVB-H, and ran trials in the UK in 2005 and in Ireland in 2007 and were part of some in Spain a while back as well. But the announcement of a new 3GPP streaming TV service in Ireland shows that it has at least temporarily abandoned that stance and will look to catch rivals Vodafone and Orange, which have had cellular streaming TV channels for some years.
The new Irish system will use the same old cellular streaming technology which has been used for TV services for the past 5 or 6 years and it could be possible that if it is a success in Ireland that it might make the hop over the Irish sea to Britain. This technology used to produce a poor picture but with new H.264 based codecs, it is more than acceptable in quality, the only trouble is that only a dozen or so people at a time can watch TV from one base station radio.
O2 and its parent Telefonica has always liked the idea of building out a new broadcast network with signals separate from the cellular network, which can be picked up on phones, but the lack of available spectrum in its native Spain and the UK, and the failure of DVB-H to take off in countries like Germany and the complete failure in France to come up with a deal about who funds such a network, has meant that using the same signal that brings your voice and data connections, seems to make more and more sense, even though it uses up precious cellular resources.
Vodafone and Orange have had streaming TV channels available for years and Vodafone right now has live coverage of the Ashes Cricket. O2 so far only has a soccer goals download service and offers video clips downloads from its O2 active portal. Of course O2 also has iTunes video content for iPhones, but this has to be downloaded too, using a wi-fi connection.
O2 will now offer Irish TV channels RTE News Now, CNN and the Travel Channel in one package and live sports and news, including Sky channels, in another. TV channels can only be watched in areas which have 3G coverage and we suspect will be best where HSDPA mobile broadband is available.
If customers sign up before September 9th they will get a free month and the service costs a single €1 for a 24 hour pass. We imagine if a similar deal comes to the UK it will cost £1. Customers buy 30 days for €5 or pay €6 if they want the package which includes Sky.
O2 is saying that only top end HSDPA capable Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson handsets can view the service, but there’s quite range of about 26 different models to choose from.