Texas Instrument announced that it has developed a chip that will allow TV on mobile phones.  See the article in USA Today at

discussing this.

It was expected to happen but now that a reputed company has announced that it has it, it does appear very real.  The implications of this for Video-on-Demand are quite interesting.

It will be very surprising if people watched their PhoneTVs as regular TVs.  There is a trend worldwide to go for bigger and bigger TVs with very high quality – HDTV – pictures.  Since people will be used to this, they are not going to really enjoy watching TV on a small screen.  Another important factor will be a business model.  How will this TV will get to phone screens?  Most probably, people will have to pay for getting this TV signal in some way.  Thus, we are talking about low quality TV for which people will have to pay.

But this definitely does not mean that PhoneTV will not be popular.  What it really means is that it will be used differently.  Clearly people may not watch a movie on PhoneTV, but people may watch important news events (show me any events related to San Diego), sports events (such as connect me to the game when Patriots get in the red zone), or personalized highlights of these events so that only important things of the event can be enjoyed while not wasting money on routine parts.  This will give rise to two different types of technologies: techniques to automatically track events and generate so people are notified of important events and to prepare highlights and present them based on personal preferences.  Both these are what will make Video-on-Demand based on what is happening within a program not just based on what the program is.  The first technology to track events in an event will require combination of technology for modeling domain events and for continuous queries.  This may also require technology to build a live data base of events happening anywhere so based on user¡¯s preferences and desires, they can be notified of appropriate events and could be connected when such events are happening in real time.  This will be a very challenging technology.  The second technology to create highlights of events and showing them to people is simpler than the first, but is still something that will be quite challenging.

Broadcast TV  will definitely be part of PhoneTV, but will it be the only thing? I think there will be many interesting applications that will emerge because it is going to be available on Phone.  Connecting to home or to some other specific places where a particule event takes place, using security or event cameras.  Once again, there may be event detection that will result in connecting to a specific phone and streaming video.  But this will be different than the broadcast TV.

What is going to happen soon is that your phones may be used more for video (that includes audio)  than just plain old-fashioned audio.