A report from the market research company, Strategy Analytics, shows that an on-demand mobile TV service, offered by the Rok Group, came second in a UK user trial behind Vodafone Vodalive offering. But that’s ahead of Orange and (Hutchison) 3’s offerings.
Rok TV has just gone live in the US, and the company is quite likely to make an impact in one of the biggest markets for mobile and television. Rok has been doing particularly well with those mobile network operators who haven’t sunk billions into 3G technology and just want to offer their subscribers access to mobile TV.
The crucial point is that Rok’s service runs over 2.5G whereas all the other are 3G services. This means, the company will compete with MobiTV, one of the companies that has helped prove that there is demand for television-on-mobiles. Only this month the VC firm Oak Investment Partners led a $70 million investment into MobiTV, which says it has struck deals with numerous mobile network operators globally as well as supplying AT&T’s Wi-Fi network.
Elsewhere, while its rivals struggle to make video work over 3G links–and 3.5G connections using say HSDPA — Rok’s compression techniques are good enough to stream a TV channel to an existing handset using 2.5G/GPRS as the carrier. The company has filed some 34 separate claims as part of its overall patent application. ROK already has the patent in the UK (GB 2410817) and has applied for similar patents on a global basis.
Rok is expanding into all the obvious markets. It has signed a deal with Shanghai Dragon Mobile Information Ltd, an approved content supplier for the world’s largest mobile network operator - China Mobile. It has struck similar deals in Taiwan, Turkey, Thailand, South Africa, Brazil and Russia.
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3 comments so far
2:49 PM PT
I thought we had grown out of using “2.5G” and “3.5G.” Guess what, 2G, 3G, and even 4G have actual definitions. If your data service is slower than 3G, it is 2G. 4G is 100 Mbps, so let’s not even worry about it. Anyway, there is certainly not enough of a difference in the core technology to class EDGE as different than GPRS or HSDPA/HSUPA as different than UMTS.
12:38 AM PT
2.5G is a well-understood term for GPRS that has been around for years, and 3.5G is a reasonable term for HSDPA/HSUPA. 3G has more than one definition in reality, given the existence of CDMA flavours, EDGE and UMTS.
3:10 PM PT
Richard, that is like arguing that “nuculer” is an acceptable alternative to nuclear because many people make the mistake. 2.5G was a marketing term created to make a very basic enhancement to existing 2G services (EDGE upgrade for GPRS) seem like a big deal. 3G has only one correct deinition — just because Verizon wanted to market their 2G services as 3G doesn’t change that. There is no way that 3.5G is a reasonable term for HSPDA/HSUPA. Even in their final iterrations, those technologies will only be up to 25% of the speed needed for 4G. Besides, just like everyone agreed well ahead of actually commercial products that 3G would be implemented on a CDMA-based platform, everyone seems to agree that 4G will be implemented on a OFDM-based platform.
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