A discussion about the Telecommunication Industry

Watching TV on your cell phone has become increasing popular in the past couple of years.  Selling video subscription services has also been a revenue growth area for cellular carriers.  However, some new cell phones may be able to bypass the cell phone carrier and pick up broadcast TV signals directly from the airwaves.  South Korea’s LG has already just released such a cell phone in Germany.   Transmitting video over existing cellular networks has led to bandwidth and network congestion issues and the next generation of cell phone networks is still being built.  Putting a digital TV decoder chip into a cell phone would seem to be an easy addition and may someday be as ubiquitous in cell phones as camera.  Cellular carriers may balk at being cut out of the revenue stream for cellular TV and broadcast TV has many limitations including being download only and not having any on-demand or personalized advertising capabilities.  But in the hyper competitive cell phone market, some carriers, especially smaller carriers, might be willing to forgo the additional revenue of TV subscriptions if it means offering customers something unique in order to get them to switch carriers.