Three of the group’s stations will participate in the Mobile Content Venture’s Dyle service and its KSTW Seattle is joining the Mobile500 Alliance.
CBS Going Mobile; Joins MCV, Mobile500
Through the participation of four of its stations, CBS will join broadcasting’s two mobile DTV initiatives, which are working to bring live broadcast television to viewers on their smartphone and tablets.
KTVT Dallas, WFOR Miami and KCAL Los Angeles will participate in the Dyle mobile TV service.
Dyle is operated by Mobile Content Venture (MCV), a joint venture of 12 major broadcast groups including Belo Corp., Cox Media Group, E.W. Scripps Co., Gannett Broadcasting, Hearst Television, Media General, Meredith Corp., Post-Newsweek Stations and Raycom Media, all of which are part of an independent entity known as Pearl LLC, as well as Fox, Ion Television and NBC.
KSTW Seattle will join the Mobile500 Alliance, which represents 50 TV groups with 437 stations, including Fisher, Hubbard, LIN and Sinclair Broadcasting. The Mobile500 Alliance stations reach 94% of U.S. TV households.
“The advent of digital television has been great for viewers and we are pleased to support these initiatives with the hope that they will help us to do an even better job of serving our audience through the delivery of our broadcasts to mobile devices,” said Peter Dunn, president, CBS Television Stations.
“Given CBS’s leadership in advocating for broadcast network television, we are pleased to support these ventures, both of which are led in large part by our affiliate partners,” said Diana Wilkin, president, CBS affiliate relations.
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Comments (3)
Gregg Palermo says:
April 16, 2012 at 9:56 am
Why does the dyle.tv website say “check back” for a list of enabled devices? Is this a case of the chicken or the egg?
Tony Alexander says:
April 16, 2012 at 12:38 pm
I am totally mystified by Dyle and mobile TV in general, at least as envisioned by the MCV. I feel as if I must be missing something or am too stupid to grasp the concept.
I have now and have had for a few years the ability to watch my home TV channels when I’m almost anywhere in the world or at a sporting event in (or not in) my home market or when I’m riding on the train to NYC or driving around in my car/truck, or in a hotel in Moscow. I simply have a 3G or 4G phone with SlingBox on it and I’ve watched local sporting events or local news or content that I’ve recorded on my DVR or on-demand movies from FiOS or movie channels like HBO or whatever content I’ve wanted to watch. I can also watch any of the cable channels that I have on my FiOS TV service. I paid about $30 for a one-time fee for the SlingBox app on an iPhone and on an Android device and it works almost perfectly. I am not paying any additional subscription fee for the video content, although I am paying for the FiOS subscription and for the data usage on my phone(s) but I have never, ever gone over my data limit and incurred additional charges. Since I am a FiOS subscriber the local broadcaster is getting paid something through retransmission, perhaps about $12/year per channel.
Furthermore, I only pay for the data usage when I’m in 3G or 4G coverage. When I’m using my phone(s) in my home or at my office (or in that hotel in Moscow) I have Wi-Fi so none of that data usage is being charged against my allotment. At some sporting events I’ve noticed that there are Wi-Fi networks available although I’ve never tried those, but I’ve never had a problem maintaining a connection even though I see several others doing the same thing that I am doing.
In addition, on these devices I can get to the Internet, check my email, make reservations for a restaurant, pay some bills or whatever I can do at my home computer and in some instances I can do that while also maintaining the connection to watch the video on SlingBox.
Even without SlingBox it is possible to see several live streamed events over the web on a 3G/4G device. In fact, I think this is now possible with the NFL Sunday Ticket for NFL games, but I don’t have an NFL Sunday Ticket subscription so I have no first-hand experience with this. Recently, I was using NASCAR’s TrackPass while at a little league baseball game.
I live in metro Washington and when I put in my zip code on the Dyle site, it says that there is no service available although there clearly are stations that are Dyle stations in Washington. Not sure what that means since if I put in a DC zip code I see that stations are available. I can receive OTA DC signals at my home.
Then, when I do research on Dyle it seems that they intended to have devices available at the end of 2011 but apparently do not have devices yet available. I visited the mobile TV booths at CES 2012 and was very, very disappointed in what I saw, but, more importantly, I visited those booths three times over three days and there never was anyone there. Others must have been disappointed also.
What did Qualcomm get wrong with Flo? I honestly don’t know. Is Dyle some reinvention of Flo?
I am unclear how the final Dyle devices and service will operate? Are they connected to my phone (this dongle was shown at CES)? Is it a separate device (also shown at CES)? Is there a subscription fee?
There is not much on the Dyle web site to explain the service, but thank goodness the lawyers have defined the service and the burdens to be place on the users. Read this curious Legal statement at http://www.dyle.tv/legal/. Must I agree to a legal document about undefined services (although defined perfectly by the legal minds that wrote it) that I may or may not need to pay for.
Again, I wonder what it all means. Back in the late 1980’s and 1990’s I had a portable Casio NTSC TV that was a handheld, battery-powered device that I took to football games so that I could watch the replays on the TV and listen to the play-by-play and commentary. It worked fine. Broadcasters also seem to continue to be enamored with real time broadcasting when actually, I think, most people want the video that they want when they want it, not what is necessarily being broadcast by the TV station. I thought that we resolved this years ago.
Broadcasters also seem bent on separating their service from The Network. Why should broadcasters try to buck the Internet? Most companies have embraced the Internet as a good thing for their business. Broadcasters are still discussing the nature of the transmission standard that was set in 1996.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that when MCV was launched it was announced that there would be co-heads from Fox and NBC. Now there is a marriage made in heaven! There are few startups that are successful when there are two companies trying to control it. But, thank goodness they have legally defined the services and the “Terms of Service.”
I see at NAB this week there will be demonstrations where “people can watch TV on the go.” What a concept! I think that I did this about 20 years ago and have continued to do so.
What am I missing?
Eugene Thompson says:
April 16, 2012 at 2:52 pm
I can hardly ‘not’ wait.