Who cares about AT&T and the IPhone. Everyone knows that droid is going to take over the market and I am quite sure they will give you access to something like this before AT&T would.

Sprint has streaming TV on there phones. You should check it out if that is what you are looking for.

Thanks…

Yes, it should be way lower power than streaming. Your phone’s transmitters are not even needed.

Receivers use very little power, (and to be perfectly pedantic, antennas use none at all).

It won’t happen with any current iPhone models, as it will require, at a minimum one new chip, probably a combination of tuner/decoder. The embedded video format will be h.264 which the iPhone already supports.

Further, local stations will have to add the digital encoding equipment to their existing transmitters to put this signal on the air. That should not be very expensive. It uses their existing frequencies but is a separate transmission than regular home digital broadcast television. (It uses an unused “vestigial sideband” of the current broadcasts. Radio talk for nooks-and-crannies.).

The standard allows for subscription services, via an optional interactive feed back loop over regular TCP/IP.

This would allow broadcasters to charge, (think: pay per view) as long as you had wifi/3G access to subscribe/pay.

Or they may simply fund it out of advertising revenue, since that would be cheaper initially. It remains to be seen what this will cost the stations and how many will adopt it.

Actual deployment on any real scale is likely two to three years away IMHO, and that’s two iPhone generations and one iTablet generation away. Built in obsolescence Rules Again!

The official announcement, somewhat more informative than either of the links posted in the story above is here: http://tinyurl.com/yz3klcd

However the actual standard is not yet fully on line so the final specifications are not available at this time. The candidate standard SUMMARY is here: http://tinyurl.com/yzktwlv .

If ATSC chose the Samsung standard (as it seems at first blush) then the method used is incompatible with the Euro DVB-H standard. But Samsung is an Apple supplier and that might mean early iPhone availability.

One interesting thing about this standard is that it encapsulates standard IP Multicast technology (one way TCP connections requiring no return transmissions). Since this is already use on the internet, it is well understood and every platform knows how to use it. The receiver would only need to hand these packets off to the TCP stack.

Further the standard includes methods of transmitting program guides (schedules) and multiple programs at the same time (think Comcast wireless… yikes) and can be encrypted (think porn).

So the standard is scalable from a single station all the way up to a subscription based comcast like entity. (sigh).

The full standard is pretty big, and I haven’t had time to wade thru it all.

Interesting stuff.

This uses nobody’s bandwidth. It requires a separate receiver chip in some future version of the iPhone to receive over the air broadcasts.

Its a receiver only. Translation, very low battery use. No more than watching a video you downloaded to the phone.

And “there” is not a replacement for “their”.

@Aaron, it wouldn’t involve cell data, if my understanding it correct. Like FM radio, it would be a different receiver pulling TV signals over the air, like your TV set at home does.