Free TV on your mobile phone

During the National Association of Broadcaster’s annual technology gathering in Las Vegas, a new pilot program was announced that could one day offer free TV service to mobile phones.

The first market to be able to test the new service is the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. region, with content from NBC, CBS, Ion,  PBS, and Fox broadcasted directly to mobile phones, notebooks and in-car entertainment systems. 

Any device used to watch content must have a built-in digital television (DTV) receiver before the ad-supported content can be accessed.  Several manufacturers have prototype phones that are able to support mobile DTV, but the necessary broadcast infrastructure hasn’t been established just yet. 

Unless manufacturers begin to subsidize and sell them directly to consumers, it’s unlikely sales will simply pick up on their own — even though demand for mobile TV is expected to be high.

Testing in Washington, D.C. is expected to begin sometime in the summer.

Broadcasts are rather inexpensive and consumers want mobile TV, which has broadcasters in overdrive to begin rolling out mobile content.  Popular video site Hulu recently confirmed a mobile version of the site will be available for Apple iPhone owners in the coming months.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Sprint Nextel all have their own mobile TV services, which range in price from $10 to $20 per month.  This industry-wide acceleration is surely bad for MobiTV — the company that offers infrastructure for Verizon and Sprint’s services — as the company has spent the past few years promoting its streaming content directly to mobile phones. 

MobiTV’s membership, somewhere in the neighborhood of six million, could explode if the company is able to work with phone carriers on a mobile DTV standard.

Despite numerous bumps in the road, the switch from analog TV to DTV will officially take place in the United States on June 12 — postponed from Feb. 17, as there were too many Americans who simply weren’t ready for the switch to take place.