Mobile Television - History

History

The first pocket-sized mobile television was sold to the public by Clive Sinclair in January 1977. It was called the Microvision or the MTV-1. It had a 2-inch CRT screen and was also the first television which could pick up signals in multiple countries. It measured 102×159×41mm and was sold for less than £100 in the UK and for around $400 in the US. The project took over ten years to develop and was funded by around £1.6 million in British Government grants.

Mobile TV is one of the features provided by many 3G phones. In 2002, South Korea became the first country in the world to have a commercial mobile TV CDMA IS95-C network, and mobile TV over 3G (CDMA2000 1X EVDO) also became available that same year. In 2005, South Korea also became the first country in the world to have mobile TV when it started satellite DMB (S-DMB) and terrestrial DMB (T-DMB) services on May 1 and December 1, respectively. Today, South Korea and Japan are at the forefront of this developing sector. Mobile TV services were launched by the operator CSL in Hong Kong, March 2006, on the 3G network. BT in the United Kingdom was the among the first companies outside South Korea to launch Mobile TV in September 2006, although the service was abandoned less than a year later. The same happened to "MFD Mobiles Fernsehen Deutschland", who launched their DMB-based service June 2006 in Germany, and stopped it in April 2008. Also in June 2006, mobile operator 3 in Italy (part of Hutchison Whampoa) launched their mobile TV service, but opposed to their counterpart in Germany this was based on DVB-H. Sprint started offering the service in February 2006 and was the first US carrier to offer the service. In the US Verizon Wireless and more recently AT&T are offering the service.