Texas Instruments brings you Digital TV
Texas Instruments unveils a digital TV on a single chip made for mobiles. (external link, .pdf file -- 936K) With some creative thinking this may allow quality video to go mobile. At least from the content provider to you. How do you now get streaming video over low bandwidth cellular radio frequencies? You get it poorly, of course, since spectrum allocated for voice isn't adequate for video. But what if you used different frequencies? With this new TV tuner chip a mobile picks up digital television from a broadcaster's conventional antenna or from a satellite, using different frequencies than those used for voice. Get it? You make a call using regular cellular radio channels, but the TV gets fed on its own frequencies. Cool. Quality transmission is only one way, you can't communicate over broadcast television freqs, but let's see what happens. As I say, "One miracle at a time!"
From TI's press release"
TI puts digital TV on mobiles
Texas Instruments has announced development of the wireless industry's first digital TV on a single chip for mobile phones, code-named "Hollywood".
The chip will receive live digital TV broadcasts at 24 to 30 frames per second using new television infrastructure that is being developed for mobile phones, doing for mobiles what HDTV did for home TVs, TI explained.
"TI´s new Hollywood digital TV chip will combine the two biggest consumer electronics inventions of our time - the television and the cell phone," said Gilles Delfassy, TI senior v-p and general manager for TI's wireless terminals business unit. "One by one, the industry's most exciting consumer electronics are being integrated into wireless handsets, allowing consumers to get their news and entertainment whenever and wherever they want. With this new chip on the cell phone, users will enjoy digital, high-quality TV in real-time."