Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that will be held on the 7th for four days in Las Vegas could serve as a major breakthrough in the beginning of a new era of portable real time TV service in the United States. Currently, a variety of mobile TV services are in progress such as the Digital Multimedia Broadcast (DMB) and Flo but their subscription rate is crawling at a rate of around two percent.
The Wall Street Journal, on the 4th, reported that OMVC (Open Mobile Video Coalition), a coalition of 800 American local broadcasts, will display other local programming broadcast services that consumers can view while moving from place to place such as news, sports and weather. In addition, the WSJ stated that noted FLO communications network such as Verizon and AT&T will offer to lend their weight to this new service. The OMVC intends to apply these services to cell phone, notebook PC, portable DVD player, and vehicle devices. Since the United States could use additional channels from last June for their analog TV became digital, OMVC became interested in more up to the minute services; especially, as they developed zip or compress technology for videos, the American broadcast firms were able to provide HD TV service to other local broadcasts. What is more eye catching is that many Korean companies will appear and exhibit an influx of mobile TV services. More specifically, LG Electronics will present a 7-inch wide-screen DVD player and a 'DP570MH' mobile digital TV, in which the retail price is approximately US$249.
