Cellular Television is Dead – Long Live Cellular Television

It was just last year that a significant chapter in the era of cellular television came to a close, when the most common broadcasting format throughout Europe, DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld), was used for the last time, and then went silent.

A year before that, chipmaker Qualcomm recognized the failure of an initiative that it had tried to promote, through the FLO Media technology, and sold the frequency band which that technology used to AT&T; thus, in North America as well, portable screens went black.

While live television broadcasts have finished playing a role in the cellular age, it is the familiar video sharing site, YouTube, that has become not only a popular way of consuming video, but also one of the websites and applications that is responsible for the bulk of data traffic on cellular networks. Today, YouTube – in its cellular version – is the second most watched video site in the world (behind its “big brother,” the YouTube website itself), with over 400 million video clips watched daily throughout the world.

But it is not just YouTube which is to blame. Cellular television was “blessed” with shortcomings that made it unprofitable, both to the consumer and to the cellular providers.

Cell phone providers, for their part, had to adapt their cellular infrastructure, both on the hardware and on the software level.

In addition, consumers had to purchase devices that came with a special receiver. And that was before the monthly payment that the consumer had to pay to watch the television channels that he could watch on his television screen at home.

Today Qualcomm believes that the LTE Broadcast technology, a 4th generation broadcast technology, will bring about the desired change in the way in which we consume video, and that cellular television will finally reach prime time.

Unlike the previous technologies, LTE Broadcast does not require cell phone networks to redistribute LTE antennas (and this is even before the LTE networks are fully deployed across the United States). In addition, this television system will support all new LTE devices that will be on sale. And, above all, there are the cell phone companies, which are waiting with bated breath to get back into the business of providing content. After Apple slammed the door in their faces, they apparently won’t miss this opportunity.