The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Nokia adds Orb for go-anywhere TV

But for one phone only

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

Nokia is bundling Orb's "MyCasting" client onto one of its smartphones, giving punters the chance to access their own TV subscriptions and music libraries on the go.

Today's announcement is for one phone, and one market only - the N80 Internet Edition Wi-Fi/3G slider phone soon to be launched in the USA - but the deal is sure to be closely watched by the wider industry. Vodafone launched an Orb trial deal in Germany this summer under the name "MeinFlo".

This year has seen plenty of hype about TV on mobile devices. Verizon's VCast and Sprint's Sprint TV offer clips and content in a range of subscription deals.

Vendors are pushing TV operators to adopt DVB-H and MediaFlo, a digital broadcast system optimised for mobile devices.

But why bother when you can simply use the cable subscription, and the channels it includes, that you already pay for? Orb requires a TV tuner card and a small run-time client on a Windows PC: that's enough to unlock music and photo collections, and streaming radio and TV broadcasts, for use on another PC or mobile device. Users can also remotely record TV shows and play them back later.

Widespread adoption of Orb would make operators' investments in high bandwidth multimedia services such as DVB-H fairly pointless.

We reviewed the N80 here and previewed the Internet Edition, here. ®

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

More from The Register

1,000 O2 staff chose redundancy over Capita
Betrayal, or just decent terms?
Google launches broadband balloons, radio astronomy frets
A careless Loon could blind the square kilometre array
 breaking news
Pttow! Ofcom kicks hams out of MoD bands
Geet off my land, you, you ... 'secondary user'
 breaking news
Now you can use your phone instead of your wallet at the ATM, too
Blimey, these little paper towels out of the vending machine are really expensive
 breaking news
UK.gov's £530m bumpkin broadband rollout: 'Train crash waiting to happen'
Whitehall whispers of damning watchdog report next month
 breaking news
MySpace zaps millions of teens' tearful rants, causes wave of angst
'Your crappy redesign SUCKS, I wanna read my blogs' screech users
 breaking news
Microsoft Office 365 on iPhone NOW: No, we're not making this up
Word, Excel, Powerpoint for your pocket-stroker
 breaking news
EU signs off on eCall emergency-phone-in-every-car plan
GPS and a mobe in every car - do you suppose the NSA would fancy that?