The time is very exciting for mobile applications firms in India. The launch of 3G coupled with arrival of various Tablets in market has made it more appealing. Also Indian service providers have also understood that in times to come it is going to be most revenue earning Value Added Service..
However still there are not many players in market providing the solution. There is handful of players only. Now the biggest issue in India is there is no standardization in terms of platform. We have Iphone users, android users, Windows mobile ,Blackberry , Symbian but still the major chunk of population have other mobile handsets with low costs platforms.
Now what has this to do to get mobile TV? Firstly it makes difficult for application developers to make an application that would be widely used as one application may work in one handset but not in others. Also can a low cost mobile support Mobile TV streaming over GPRS ,the answer is no. For effortlessly supporting mobile TV .firstly 3G or WIFI is must (Over GPRS/EDGE it can work but not worth watching) and secondly handset needs to support any streaming protocol. Also one can directly through compatible mobile browser watch mobile TV, but then installing an application makes it faster and more convenient.
Now to talk about mobile applications we have, Mundu TV Apalya TV, Zenga TV, Yupp TV etc.
Apalya TV,I would say them the leaders . They provide mobile TV solution to all major service providers, be it on GPRS/WiFi/3G. The Hyderabad based provide services to Airtel,BSNL,Aircel,Idea,MTNL, MTS,Reliance,Tata Docomo and others. Their application comes inbuilt in various handsets. The latest to join bandwagon is HP DREAMSCREEN which has in inbuilt Apalya application.
Mundu TV works on all major platforms. For Blackberry also they are planning to come up with an application. It has mostly Zee Channels with 18 channels total. The video quality is descent. It comes free initially with trial period and then on subscription charges of Rs49/monthly to Rs149/monthly.
Zenga TV, which I am able to find in Olive Pad only. It comes with a 6 months free subscription service, though what would be the charges then is not known. It’s a relatively better application with various option of Live TV, Reality TV and Movies .If you are reality serials fan, one can watch previous episodes of BigBoss, Splitsvilla. Also the no of channels are also more, but then I was surprised to see that this application is not in android market also.
Yupp TV, primarily having all South Indian Channels has an application for IPhone as well as Android .The application has an Trial period of 13 days and then offers various packages of Tamil ,Telgu and Kannada with some Hindi channels also.
These mobile TV provide basic Mobile TV streaming, though would be great if they provide advanced features such as recording and saving it for viewing it later, include more channels and with 3G being launched means more bandwidth should give an luxury for application developers to come up with more interactive applications
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