In his Fierce VoIP post on Monday, Doug Mohney reports that one of his takeaways from last week's CES is that your TV is morphing into a phone. Maybe so, but another - and potentially bigger - story at CES is how your phone is turning into a TV set.
The Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) debuted the new ATSC candidate standard for broadcast - free-to-air - mobile TV rolling toward final approval later this year. At CES, the OMVC was showing live broadcasts on prototype handsets, mobile video players, PCs, and in-vehicle video players.
This just could be more important even than making a videophone call via your 54-inch HD TV. It might even be - dare I say it? - even more important than Skype's announcement last month about the VoIP's demise; a discovery, let me add, that is hardly original - Jajah co-founder Roman Scharf famously tried this attention-attracting gimmick back in 2006.
Why is the OMVC's announcement important? Because it's a potential game-changer.
Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far way...in 1927, to be exact, American Telephone & Telegraph and Bell Laboratories demo-ed what the New York Times called "the first practical demonstration of television," in which live picture and sound were transmitted from Washington, D.C. Continue Reading...
