Philippine Cell Phones

Some exciting news! Smart Communications has finally launched the first commercially available Mobile TV service in the Philippines. This  new service is called MyTV.

So how is Mobile TV different from the existing mobile video services?  The technologies used totally different from one another in the sense that one makes use of 3G to stream the broadcast while the other uses DVB-H to broadcast the video. According to wikipedia:

DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld) is a technical specification for bringing broadcast services to handheld receivers. DVB-H was formally adopted as ETSI standard EN 302 304 in November 2004. DVB-H is officially endorsed by the European Union.The major competitor of this technology is Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB).

3G streamed media is low in quality and allots a lot of buffering so it isn’t exactly smooth. DVB-H broadcasts, on the other hand, are crisp and clear and almost no buffering is done since it’s a live feed. Think of it as watching a movie through the Internet (3G streamed) and on TV (DVB-H).

You need, however, a DVB-H enabled phone like  the Nokia 92 for this.