TV on your smartphone without internet: Direct-to-mobile broadcasting pilot study in NCR soon

New Delhi: A pilot study on direct-to-mobile broadcasting, which has the potential to enhance the reach of television manifold, will be carried out in the national capital region soon, Information and Broadcasting Secretary Apurva Chandra said on Thursday.

Addressing the Big Picture Summit organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry here, Chandra said direct-to-mobile broadcasting was the “next big thing” for television media as it has the potential to increase viewership manifold.

 “Currently, there are about 20 crore television households in the country. India has over 60 crore smartphone users and 80 crore broadband users. Reach of television media is set to be much higher,” he said.

He said IIT-Kanpur and Sankhya Labs have carried out a pilot study on direct-to-mobile broadcasting in Bengaluru and were now launching another study in either Noida or someplace near Delhi.

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What is direct-to-mobile broadcasting?

As the name suggests, it’s essentially TV on smartphones, but without an active internet connection. It works similarly to FM radio in that a receiver built into the gadget can access radio frequencies.

The Broadband and broadcast technologies are combined to enable mobile phones to receive local digital TV feeds, thereby enabling multimedia content to be broadcast directly to smartphones.

The technology is aimed at directly broadcasting citizen-centric information and countering fake news, issuing emergency alerts, and providing assistance during calamities. It can be used to broadcast live news, sports events etc. All of this, however, is without any buffering that too without consuming internet data.

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Consumers can also, with direct-to-mobile, stream content from Video on Demand (VoD) and Over The Top (OTT) services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hotstar without exhausting data limit.

The transfer of video traffic from mobile to broadcast network would free up bandwidth and decongest mobile spectrum. This can result into reduced call drop sand better internet speed.

India has over 1.2 billion mobile phone users and 600 million smartphone users who consume much information and entertainment via mobile devices.

With the help of direct-to-mobile valuable content can be directly provided to people in far-flung areas without mobile connectivity. Even in the areas that do have mobile connectivity not everyone has access to unlimited high-speed internet. But with the need for internet connection taken out of the picture anyone who has a smartphone, no matter where they are or whether they have high-speed internet, can be provided with important information.

With inputs from PTI Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.