Talk about exploiting market transients; Telegent Systems offer chips that would enable cell phones to receive analog televisions. Say what ??? In simple terms, the premise is as follows: after many years in the hype-machine, (digital) mobile TV has not yet taken off yet. And they believe it’s not going to take off any time soon in the future either. Current numbers indicate that market penetration in established market in Europe won’t even reach 10% by 2010. This is due to many reasons, ranging from getting a standard together, getting a good program line-up, as well as establishing a good business model for the operators. All this is happening while analog TV is still going strong, especially in developing countries such as China, India and Latin America. Yes, digital TV will be eventually turned off, but for most part of the world, this won’t happen until the next decade. And best of all, analog TV is free !! No business model to create, no negotiations with carriers necessary.
The company realizes that offering mobile chips to receive analog TV is not a sustainable business model in the long term. But if you look at the next five years or so; it is quite apparent that digital mobile TV would never get the level of coverage you get with current analog TV (remember how long 3G was supposedly was already ‘around the corner’ ?). So while all the other players are investing a lot of money into building DVB-H chips for market that is not even yet established, Tellegent are already putting more than 5 million chips on cell phones as of early 2008. Talk about exploiting market transient, eh ??
Technically speaking, analog TV standard such as PAL and NTSC is created decades ago, way before the concept of mobile reception is even a consideration. As such, there is absolutely no provisions for mobile reception. Telegent gets around this by exploiting the fact that you really don’t need a very high level of fidelity for your 2 inch cell phone screen.
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