Mannerisms

No one else seems to profess any interest in watching TV on a cellphone. In fact most people feel a bit affronted when you suggest that they might. ‘Do I look that sad?’ is the sort of response.

Even where company execs are heavily engaged in developing products to enable TV-to-the-cellphone, the execs themselves don’t seem to have much expectation that they’ll be watching it.

“I really find it difficult to believe I’ll watch TV on a little screen”, says Sandeep Chennakeshu, senior vice president of the wireless and mobile systems group at Freescale Semiconductor, “but the behaviour of the younger generation is so very different.”

If young people are not interested in TV to the mobile then I don’t know where it’s going.” Ian Hay, marketing programmes director at Renesas.

Trouble is, young people are, apparently, watching less and less TV, preferring to download video clips and games

“TV-to-the-cellphone won’t be the same TV as we watch at home. In Asia, people spend hours commuting every day on horrible trains,” says Gilles Delfassy, senior vice president of the worldwide wireless terminals business unit semiconductor group at Texas Instruments, “the cell phone is the platform they have with them. They’ll watch sports results. Music clips.”

There’s a view that TV-to-the-handset won’t happen until we get rollable screen allowing you to pull out a six inch by four inch screen from the side of your phone and watch in reasonable style.

You’d think the wireless network operators, stumped these last six years for an application for mobile internet, would be investing in rollable screen development.

But they don’t know why mobile internet is failing to take off, so they don’t know what to do to make it succeed.