Washington DC announced as first MPH mobile TV market

In the 22 city-strong foot race to get a live MPH-based mobile TV network up, running, and available to anyone who wants it, it looks like Washington DC's poised to come out on top. Raleigh has already deployed a handful of transmitters for the benefit of bus-goers, but the Open Mobile Video Coalition has announced that Washington DC's local CBS, PBS, NBC, and Ion affiliates plus a Fox-owned independent will all be ready to roll with MPH transmissions by late summer; of course, what remains to be seen is what sort of hardware will be ready to take advantage of the tech by then. We can likely count AT&T and Verizon out for offering MPH-enabled handsets seeing how they're still trying to figure out how to profit from their MediaFLO-based networks, so T-Mobile and Sprint's decisions to take a wait-and-see approach to the mobile TV phenomenon may really end up working in their favor here. Moving beyond the phones, it's said that Dell will be showing some sort of netbook this week with an integrated MPH tuner at the NAB show in Vegas this week, while Kenwood has in-car solutions in the works. As long as the broadcasts stay free -- which by all accounts they will -- the standard has a fighting chance at relevancy, assuming hardware comes to the table.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 20th 2009 5:09AM]

Trials were conducted in early 2008, works well while traveling up to 140mph.

http://ces.cnet.com/8301-13855_1-9841395-67.html?tag=more

I'm very happy we're finally going to get the choice to have portable tv's (pocket tv's and in-car systems) where we can watch local broadcast with the new digital system, it's long overdue.

[The Missing Link Posted Apr 20th 2009 7:16PM]

Agreed 100%.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 20th 2009 6:28AM]

I agree with Patrick on this. Hey, anything that's free of the stranglehold of a carrier(*cough* MediaFLO) get all thumbs up from me!