13 April, 2008

Mobile Radio Vs. Mobile TV Streaming

We have been witnessing lately the live TV Streaming on mobile over GPRS technology around the world's GSM networks

I still dunno how much of a feasible things this is! apart from the opinion of researchers in this domain's idea , I have never, ever seen anyone using this service around here in jordan, despite the fact its available on all the GSM mobile networks operating, nor i've seen any one using it in Europe!

Maybe having a radio streaming service is more efficient, convenient, and feasible. and lets think about it for a lil' bit!

What Radio over GPRS/EDGE would mean for the nation as a service?
- Having Radio available everywhere! without any area limitations, and without reception problems when you're traveling. Maybe having the in-car integrated mobile phones benefiting from this service to listen to the radio stations over GPRS/EDGE whenever the station's signal gets weaker and RDS-AF didn't get to receive a better signal.

- This will enable the radio stations broadcasting on a nation wide coverage through GSM Networks.

- In case of listening through a headset, its more feasible to listen to radio over GPRS (just like listening to a Mobile's FM Radio), than watching TV through it.

- Having it as a service would most probably insure having it at a low affordable price, especially when compared with TV Streaming over GPRS, which is alot more costy for both the customers and the operators (where infrastructure costs are kind of limited).


There might be mobile streaming some softwares around like the J2ME MFRadio, The Symbian specificVRadio, and the Window Mobile specific Mortplayer , but a software-only concept has a lot of limits, while Having it as a service would change all the measures regarding Radio over GPRS.
MFRadio for example, is an open source project of a software used by the Russian mobile operation MegaFon, for a value-added service of this kind. Thus, the service motivated the software, and not vis a vis in this case.
Having it as a service, with a specific protocol can even make special in-car integrated telephony & Audio systems get united, having the car computer switching to the radio station over GPRS in case no clear radio reception is available in the area of driving.

who knows, maybe we'd have this becoming a reality one day :)

Until then, lets see this nice attempt of streaming through a Windows Mobile PDA, that broadcasts whats being streamed through GPRS over an FM signal modulator built-in the PDA, and thus received through the car radio. cool stuff, but very complicated.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is great Nassim...I'm looking forward to reading your blogs after the workshop :) cheers