ROK launches streaming to mobile product
ROK Entertainment, which markets a mobile TV player and service, has developed a solution that it says can deliver television programmes from your home television to your mobile phone wherever you are in the world.
The service works like this. A customer buys a ROK box (for about £250) which connects to the TV signal feed. It also connects to the user’s set top box via infrared. Out the other end of the box is a connection to a user’s broadband modem.
Inside that box is an encoding engine, encoding the TV signal to ROK’s own proprietary format. Also in the box is a streaming server. In your mobile handset is a ROK client and player. When the customer points his ROK client at the server, connecting over GPRS, or from any remote internet connection, the server streams the content to his handset. The handset can also be used to change the TV channel remotely.
Tim Revel, technical development manager at ROK, says the stream is about 40k, which equates to about a Megabit of data in four minutes. How expensive that might be would be determined by a user’s data contract. ROK’s publicity claims you could be watching your own TV and changing channels from your hotel room in Beijing. We wouldn’t like to see the roaming charges though.
Obviously the service also relies on leaving your broadband connection on so you can access the ROK server, which might frighten a few people. But as a concept, and a means of bypassing operator control of access to TV channels and services, it may well attract some interest.