TV finally personal!

The mobile TV market is getting crowded. There is already ipla, HBO and TVN, recently Orange and TVP have joined with their own platforms. There is also Mobile TV from Plus and Cyfrowy Polsat based on DVB-T technology. It is becoming increasingly popular to watch TV where and when you want.

Thanks to the growing popularity of smartphones, there is a possibility of watching a decent quality picture transmitted over the Internet using a mobile phone. It seems that this way of watching TV is becoming more and more popular. The first on the Polish market with such an offer was ipla Internet TV. It gives users access to a very large database of movies, series and TV shows on demand and to live TV channels. Interactive TV can be viewed on a computer, TV set and on mobile devices – tablets and smartphones with Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Symbian systems. ipla model seems to be doing well in the market, currently having over half a million downloads on Google Play alone and great reviews in the markets.

At the beginning of this year two new mobile TV platforms appeared on the market – TVN Player and HBO Go with personal TV service. Both allow you to watch VOD content and live TV channels. The applications are slowly gaining users – on Google Play TVN already has over 500 thousand and HBO over 50 thousand downloads of its application.

In the middle of the year there was launched Television Here and There from Orange. The platform allows you to watch VOD content and live channels. At the moment it is available for Android, iOS and Symbian devices, soon it will also appear on Windows Phone smartphones. It's a cool idea for your carrier to offer special internet packages that reduce the cost of watching TV using the 3G network.

TVP also has its own tvp mobile application.en, in which Android and iOS users can watch movies, series and journalistic programs on demand.

Another solution was offered to their customers by Cyfrowy Polsat and Plus with their Mobile Television service. Instead of broadcasting TV over the Internet they use special radio waves in DVB-T technology. By equipping yourself with a portable receiver and configuring it with your smartphone you can enjoy generally available TV channels live on your smartphone screen. The advantage is the low cost (especially if we compare to the price of data transmission over 3G), the disadvantage is the need for an additional device. So far more than 10 thousand people have downloaded the application from Google Play.

It seems that finally the broadcasters have found a way to monetize the users of mobile devices. Thanks to mobile TV, we, the viewers, no longer have to be at home at a specified time to watch our favorite series. We have access to many TV shows on our terms – we can decide for ourselves what we want to watch, where and when. Beautiful is this world thanks to mobile!