TV place-shifting company Sling Media and Smartphone OS specialist Symbian are partnering to bring living room TV viewing to mobile phones anywhere in the world. Sling Media says it will deliver a version of its SlingPlayer Mobile software application, currently available only in the USA and Canada, for the Symbian OS in select European and Asian countries during Q4 and will extend availability to the USA shortly thereafter. Unlike other mobile TV offerings SlingPlayer Mobile delivers customers’ individual complete home TV experience to mobile handsets using standard network connections, including 3G cellular and Wi-Fi.

The new SlingPlayer Mobile for Symbian OS software package will enable users to transform their supported Symbian Smartphones on S60 and UIQ into personal, on-the-move digital TVs providing anytime, anywhere access to their living room television experience. Any programme that can be watched at home - including content from terrestrial TV, Freeview, cable, and satellite TV and so on - will be viewable through a Slingbox on supported Symbian Smartphones. In addition, SlingPlayer Mobile lets users control their home personal video recorder (PVR) to watch recorded shows, pause, and rewind live TV or even queue new recordings while away from home.

“People love their living room TV programming and simply want the ability to watch it on any device wherever they happen to be, whether at work on their PC, around the home on their wireless laptop, or on the go via their mobile phone,” claims Sling Media co-founder and ceo Blake Krikorian.

“I've been using a beta version of the SlingPlayer Mobile on a Symbian Smartphone, and it's pure sweetness,” adds Krikorian, modestly.

In other mobile TV news O2 and Arqiva have announced the first consumer trial of broadcast mobile TV in Ireland, and MTN South Africa says it has launched Africa’s first commercially cell phone TV service.

Both the Irish and South African systems utilise the Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld (DVB-H) standard. Arch-rival – in mobile TV standards terms – MediaFLO also reports progress with the FLO Forum announcing the publication of three new Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) specifications. These are the FLO Minimum Performance Standards (MPS) for devices, MPS for transmitters, and the Test Application Protocol for devices and transmitters. The first tranche of TIA-approved MediaFLO specifications were announced in July (click). In an interview in an up-coming issue of ‘Convergence World’ magazine, Qualcomm MediaFLO Technologies’ director for International Business Development Jeffery Brown claims that DVB-H and MediaFLO are the only two serious contenders in the mobile TV standards stakes, and that in the next six-to-twelve months MediaFLO will be ahead of the DVB community so far as standards published are concerned.
John Williamson