Windows Phone Thoughts: Digital TV Coming To Cell Networks

"Europe's Digital Video Broadcast group has launched an ambitious standards effort designed to marry the cell phone network infrastructure with terrestrial digital TV broadcasting. 'This has been secret up until now,' said Ulrich Reimers, a professor at the Institut fuer Nachrichtentechnik (Braunschweig, Germany) and chairman of DVB's Technical Module, who described DVB-X to small groups of engineers at the DVB World 2003 conference here last week. The specification would be used for distributing 'audiovisual and multimedia services to all citizens, independent of their location,' said Goeran Wahlberg, Nokia Corp.'s director for concepts and technology. 'The world is going increasingly mobile,' said Wahlberg, who predicted that this 'mobility-improved transmission standard for terrestrial digital TV' will become 'a mandatory spec for handheld devices in the future.'

Basically, the idea is to combine both high-speed wireless data and broadcast technologies in a complementary fashion to enable a richer wireless experience on handheld devices. If it works, it's more entertainment while you're stuck in line. :)