TV goes mobile with analogue

SUNNYVALE CALIFORNIA:In the go-digital era it's a surprise to find a company exploiting analogue communications technology (it is used in traditional television broadcasting). Analogue has long been deemed so limited in capacity that regulators have decided to phase out its use for television broadcasting. Sunnyvale, California-based Telegent, however, has gone analogue with resounding success.

Telegent's big idea was to create television capacity on a chip and to insert that chip into a mobile phone.

Now, if you want mobile television there's no need to wait for cheap 3G broadband or be caught out with expensive subscriptions services.

A Telegent-powered phone can give you free-to-air TV immediately, because it is configured to receive existing TV transmissions. That's RTÉ, TV3 and cross-channel services. The barrier to such an innovation is that nobody expected it to happen.

Regulator across the world have been attempting to phase out analogue broadcasts in favour of digital.

Digital standards were developed partly because regulators believed it would be impossible to transmit analogue signals to mobile handsets. Now that's been shown to be possible.

While it has been eagerly adopted in some areas, it will have to compete with the new business models that network operators have been developing for markets like Ireland where mobile video content comes at a high price. In terms of the technology though, by taking a step backwards into analogue, Telegent have shown that free broadcast TV on the mobile is already here.