FOR years it was the talk of the wireless industry: beaming television to the world's four billion cellphones would be the icon of the digital age. Now, just three letters are hastening the demise of that vision. App, short for “application”, the programs people download from online stores to run on their portable phones have enabled consumers to choose for themselves which moving pictures to take in when they are on the go. The one-size-fits-all approach of broadcast mobile TV got stuck before it even properly took off. One way to see why not is to watch young Brazilian footballers knocking a soccer ball around in the Helsinki Cup. A youth tournament currently playing in the Finnish capital, it's hardly a world event in the conventional sense. But the video clips they are uploading from their phones will run on their parents' mobiles or PCs back home. The service they are using comes from a Web site which offers users the chance to send video from cellphones to their own TV channels on the Web. A small venture, it is one of thousands of offerings from the likes of Apple, Nokia, RIM and many others letting users drive their mobile entertainment. It's an important distinction, says Andrew Bud, Chairman of the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF), a London-based trade association for the mobile media industry. He talks about mobile TV - which is broadcast - as opposed to mobile video, which you load onto your device. “Mobile TV is all about real-time, linear transmission ... where the timing of the programming was set by the broadcaster and the consumer would dip in and dip out,” he said. “Mobile video is much more about video-on-demand. It gives the consumer much more freedom. It's also a little less stressful on the mobile networks.” Technological strain has been a factor restricting the growth of broadcast television on mobiles, enabling swift-moving plug-ins to fill the gap.
