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City sites on your mobile
August 25, 2004
Sick of weather information that just isn’t accurate? A new mobile service is giving consumers the chance to actually see what the weather is like in 65 cities around the world, as well as getting travel and event information.
Telcast Media Group has developed a broadcast and transmission technology to support a network of remote-controlled television cameras on five continents.
Now that mobile phone technology has advanced to support video streaming, the same quality images are available on the smallest screen through Telcast’s earthTV programs.
With a 2.5G or 3G handset, consumers can access live broadcasts, 24-hours a day, from around the globe, through Internet
Telcast director of broadband and wireless Heidi Klocker says the Telcast camera network was established to provide feeds into TV networks with its broadcast clients, including CNN, RTL, Sky Asia and Voyage. The image quality is therefore the highest possible, placing it apart from web cams. Each camera can be remotely operated from Munich, to provide 360-degree panoramas, wide angle or zoom shots.
“We offer consumers a virtual tour of the world, live,” Klocker says. “We are giving the same images we supply to the major TV networks, with news and travel information. The earthTV programs will fill the tremendous demand for live video content which will grow exponentially as 3G starts to take off.”
The earthTV package includes four services, each supported with in-house editorial content.
WeatherLIVE gives images of 65 major cities updated each hour, accompanied by forecasts and other important weather details. TravelLIVE offers information on sport, concerts, festivals and cultural events around the globe. PlanetLIVE will offer virtual postcards, sending still or video panoramas, while earthQuiz tempts users with a daily prize to identify a mystery location.
Klocker says that to best use the mobile technology, the video feeds are introduced with a graphics interface. The images are then followed by more information, general and location specific.
Launched in January, earthTV mobile services are available in Germany, Slovenia and Poland and the content can be adapted by its broadcast centre to meet specific operator needs. It can provide streaming video and video clips from television broadcast quality to Real Media, Windows Media or 3GPP standards. Video clip length can be varied, as can graphics content, language and the number of updates per day.
EarthTV is also considering having mobile, event-based cameras, to best capture activities as they happen. Expansion could also take place in the areas of traffic services and city guides.
A new Ericsson hosted service, with Ericsson Content Delivery System as a platform, will help ease the way into new markets for this and similar applications. Ericsson Italy has developed the hosted service that will give that country’s four mobile operators access to earthTV’s video streaming services. It will soon also be available in other countries.
According to Ericsson Italy President and CEO Cesare Avenia, video applications are an important avenue for increasing traffic. Ericsson is keen to help bring video to consumers and its hosted service is an integral part of the process.
“Our service delivers content to mobile network operators in an effective, quick, reliable way in order to ease concept, design and launch of new video services while keeping capital expenditure as low as possible,” Avenia says.
The hosted service will play an important role in allowing operators smooth, easy and affordable access to services such as earthTV, he says.
“This is a good offering which will be of great benefit to operators who intend to use services capillary diffusion through mobile devices and networks to offer video content and multimedia services to consumers.”
For more information go to: http://www.earthTV.com.
