Link for Mobile Viewing

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about the future of television. People are inevitably going to turn off their 42″ 1080p LCDs, get off the couch, go to the kitchen table, pop out their cellphones and watch the same stuff, live or on-demand, on their 4″ cell phone display.

Now, obviously that is an exaggeration, but is mobile really the future of TV? BCE, owner of Bell, who has sought mobile distribution agreements with many Canadian media properties such as CTV, TSN, MTV Canada, BNN, CBC and even HBO — to name but a few — seems to think so. So much so, in fact, that they are bundling Mobile TV on every Bell-sold BlackBerry and Android device that supports it.

I was able to test out the Android app on two of the best phones in Canada: the Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant (4″ Super AMOLED display: awesome) and the newly-released HTC Desire Z (3.7″ QWERTY keyboard, Sense UI: freaking awesome) and they both performed admirably, but the Desire Z took the crown in terms of overall performance.

3G Kings and Queens

Keep in mind that Canada has no infrastructure for transmitting TV over the air like in Japan and South Korea. The TV experience on Bell is similar to that of YouTube or any other streaming video service, and thusly relies on the speed and coverage of your 3G connection.

The newly-released HTC Desire Z supports HSPA+ speeds of 14.4Mbps, double that of all previous HSPA phones. This is a theoretical maximum and will not reach anywhere near that, but the extra legroom allows, as you can tell from the video, a smoother video watching experience.

Also keep in mind that watching any amount of video of 3G will use a significant amount of bandwidth. However, the whole idea of mobile TV is to use it, say, where there wouldn’t be a high-speed WiFi connection. These days, your 3G phone will be 2-3x faster than the WiFi pipe at Starbucks, for example.

Does it bring the goods?

The selection at this point is meagre: premium content such as HBO is available for a monthly subscription of $5, and there are a number of other channels for a cost. Free content is limited, though there is some decent stuff out there like CBC News, which is live, and on-demand shows like South Park, Jackass and Jersey Shore.

For $8/month, which I think is fairly reasonable, you get access to 20 Sirius Radio channels through the app. Quality, as always, is very good, but I can’t imagine it would be worth subscribing to over, say, Rdio, an on-demand music streaming service, at $10/month, or Slacker Radio, a viable streaming alternative for Canadians, at $4/month. And no, you ain’t getting Howard Stern.

Quality over Quantity

While the quantity lacks for a ton of choice, what you do get is streamed at a high resolution, especially over WiFi, and both sound and video quality is excellent. As you can see from the video, faster-moving scenes like the clip from Jackass, causes minor artifacting, but overall your experience should be good.

I found load times on the Galaxy S to be a little bit excruciating, though the extra bandwidth available to the Desire Z heartily improved those, and once loaded, the buffer is big enough that you shouldn’t encounter any hiccups.

I love it! Can we keep him?

On-demand shows can be downloaded to your device to be played at a later date. This does not mean, however, that once downloaded you own the show, and is tethered to the device itself. No transferring it to your computer to watch at a later time. This does, however, provide a decent opportunity for offline viewing, something lacking in a service such as Netflix.

This service competes with Rogers’ newly-released On Demand Mobile application, also available on the Android Marketplace, but I found the functionality of the Bell app to be better and more intuitive to use. They make use of a lot of excellent UI choices such as horizontal list scrolling and tabs-on-the-bottom.

So, if you have an Android device from Bell, you’ll see the icon for TV & Radio is already there. Click on it, explore it. If you want, subscribe to stuff. You can always cancel it later if you don’t like it. Chances are, however, if this is the future of television, you’ll probably want to see it through.