Ars Technica Reviews MobiTV

[Janak Parekh]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/mobitv.ars/1' target='_blank'>http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/mobitv.ars/1</a><br /><br /></div><i>"A couple of decades ago, watching TV on the go meant buying a Sony Watchman. First introduced in 1982 with a 2.5" grayscale display, the Watchman picked up a color display for the first time at the beginning of the 1990s...Fans of portable TV have many more choices today. You can buy episodes of your favorite television show on iTunes and watch them on your iPod, or cap shows on your PC and move them to a portable video player of your choice. If you've got one of over 30 different cell phones and service with just about any US cellular provider other than Verizon, there's another option: MobiTV."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/parekh-20070606-ArsMobiTV.jpg" /><br /><br />Ars takes MobiTV for spin on a Treo 750. Their thoughts? Check out the article for full details, but the short version is that there are currently too many dropouts, even on AT&amp;T's 3G network. I'm guessing this is a technology that'll improve over time, as data networks become faster and more stable.

[Mark Larson]

Not available for any Windows device on Sprint :(

[dma1965]

I agree with the review, which is generally negative. The authorization alone can be quite aggravating, and what is the most aggravating thing about it is the fact that the content offered is crappy to mediocre, and the gaps while trying to watch are nearly unbearable. My common scenario was something like this: Find a channel with something I actually want to watch (like CNET), start watching a story, screen goes blank after about a minute, wait from 30 seconds to forever to get it to restart, watch for another minute, wait again, etc., etc. , shut it off because it pisses me off.

It looks really cool when you want to show off your device, but is not anything close to a pleasant TV watching experience. I wish microsoft would reintroduce the application they had a few years back, which allowed you to download content for offline viewing. It was smooth and worked well, even though it was not live.

[Mark Larson]

I wish microsoft would reintroduce the application they had a few years back, which allowed you to download content for offline viewing. It was smooth and worked well, even though it was not live.
All you need to watch TV Shows is a torrent or cap of the show, PocketDivXEncoder to make it smaller, and TCPMP to play it on the WM device. It works better than WMP for video.

[ikesler]

one thought:

Slingbox


:D

[dma1965]

I wish microsoft would reintroduce the application they had a few years back, which allowed you to download content for offline viewing. It was smooth and worked well, even though it was not live.
All you need to watch TV Shows is a torrent or cap of the show, PocketDivXEncoder to make it smaller, and TCPMP to play it on the WM device. It works better than WMP for video.

I remember the application. It was part of the Plus! Digital Media Edition Pack and it was called Sync &amp; Go. You simply set up what you wanted to sync (radio shows, new stations, etc.), and whenever you synced your device it would check for new content and download it for offline viewing. It totally rocked!

I know you can get caps and convert and copy and so on. What made this great was that it did it all transparently and automatically.

[cgavula]

Although the idea of saving the stream is a good one, both solutions mentioned (sync &amp; go and slingbox) require the involvement of yet another device. The whole point of MobiTV is for the process to work without requiring another device to handle the stream/download.

Now if only MobiTv (and/or the 2.5G/3G networks carrying the signal) worked acceptably, we'd be all set!

--Chris