The Year in Review: Mobile Video

Dubbed by some as the “digital dividend” spectrum, the European rollover to digital television, which will follow the U.S. lead-off in early 2009, will free up the ultrahigh frequency (UHF) spectrum from 470M to 800-plus MHz (in some instances in Europe, it will be up to 806 MHz, while other areas will free up to 862 MHz). Like Verizon and AT&T Wireless in the U.S., this spectrum can be used for next-generation mobile broadband, called long term evolution (LTE), which will enable radio waves to both travel farther and more deeply penetrate buildings.

Yielding broader and more cost-effective mobile broadband coverage, particularly in rural areas, led the Swiss government to use this spectrum to “enable excellent mobile broadband coverage of rural areas while offering good penetration into buildings,” according to a GSMA press release.

Besides the Swiss government, the Finnish, French, and Swedish governments have also allocated this spectrum to mobile broadband services, leading to growing support among European governments and encouraging equipment-makers to develop handsets within the frequency band.

“The extraordinary global success of GSM is partly due to the harmonized allocation of spectrum by European governments,” says GSMA’s Tom Phillips, chief government and regulatory affairs officer, “so it is vitally important that other European governments follow in the footsteps of these four pioneering countries and also commit this spectrum band to mobile broadband services … [enabling] economies of scale necessary to drive down the price of mobile devices and network equipment.”

Browsers and Platforms
Finally, no mention of the 2008 mobile-video-handset market would be complete without touching on browsers and platforms that developed over the course of the year and will continue to grow in 2009.

Browsers
Safari, Opera, and Firefox have all been quite successful in the high-end mobile phone market. With the exception of the ability to play Flash content, the iPhone’s Safari browser handles content the same way its desktop cousin does. Based on Webkit, the browser is setting new standards for connected users to keep up with their web browsing wherever they are on a mobile network.

Not to be outdone, the Opera Mobile browser, which was launched in 2000, is on more than 100 million phones and has been launched on Google’s new entrant into the mobile handset space: the Android platform. As the first browser from Opera available to users of the T-Mobile G1, the Android platform’s first phone, Opera is hoping to get in early on what could be a device that gives the iPhone a run for its money.

While the world moves closer to mobile browsers that behave like desktop ones, there’s an interesting fight brewing in terms of the validity of patents around touch (one of Apple’s key features on the iPhone is multitouch gestures) and mobile web browsing.

In late November, EMG Technology, LLC filed a lawsuit accusing Apple of patent violation through “the way the iPhone navigates the Internet,” a claim based on a patent that EMG was granted titled “Apparatus and method of manipulating a region on a wireless device screen for viewing, zooming and scrolling internet content.”

While the first issue that comes to mind is multitouch, the patent covers “the display of Internet content reformatted from HTML to XML on mobile devices,” according to one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers. So the complaint contends that the conversion from HTML to XML is now an industry standard for phones such as the iPhone rather than addressing mobile phone browsers that actually adapt the content to nonstandard web browsers such as those found natively on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices.

Finally, speaking of touch, the BlackBerry Storm rolled out in the U.K. during Streaming Media Europe. It then debuted in the U.S. just before Thanksgiving 2008. The phone has four buttons compared to the iPhone’s one, and the entire screen depresses, which is both intriguing and disconcerting. Regardless, with touch capability and EVDO Rev A connectivity, this BlackBerry looks poised to drive the adoption of standard browsers and streaming media content forward in the enterprise space.

New platforms
Android isn’t the only phone platform to make its debut in 2008, although some would argue the other major one, iPhone 2, is just an upgrade from the phone’s first version. Ask anyone who owned a first-generation iPhone, though, and they’ll tell you that new life was breathed into the device with multiple new options. Unlike the Windows Mobile devices that often can only be upgraded if they were bought within a certain time period (and even then only by the choice of the handset or service provider), Apple made sure that all features supported by hardware were available on both the new iPhone 3G and the original iPhone—this means, for the most part, everything except GPS and 3G connectivity.