Philips bringing cell phone TV to states
The Dutch electronics giant Philips now plans to bring its TV-on-cellular chipset to the United States. Handsets with the chips should hit North American shelves sometime in 2006. To ensure that content and content services will be available, Philips has partnered with Crown Castle Mobile Media.
Crown Castle has acquired terrestrial rights to 5 megahertz of L band spectrum and will launch a mobile broadcast network in 2006.
The company will show off the technology at the Computer Electronics Show kicking off on Jan. 5 in Las Vegas.
The company announced a similar chipset — which consists of a TV tuner, a decoder and peripheral components — for the European market earlier in the year. Three out of the six largest handset makers are currently building phones containing the chip for trials that will likely start soon.
Commercially, the first European phones should hit the market toward the middle of 2006, when the FIFA World Cup takes place, said GertJan Kaat, senior vice president and general manager of Philips Semiconductors’ mobile and personal business unit.
The U.S. chipset is essentially the same product. “It is a small shift in the frequency band. The rest is all the same,” Kaat said.
Source: News.com.
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