Satellite Tv Service

We live in the mobile connected world. It seems that everyone walking down the street today is carrying some gadget to keep them connected to some sort of entertainment or information source. People walk down the street, apparently talking to them selves, with a Blue Tooth earpiece/microphone clipped to their ear. They sway at the bus stop to some unheard music with an MP3 player in their pocket and wires running out of their ears. People sit on busses and trains with a PDA in their hands messaging away to the world while on their way to work or lunch. And amazingly, there are people doing all three at once; the ultimate multi-taskers.

Fortunately, there is not a small hand-held, battery-operated television set available to further distract people on the street. Or is there? Actually there are a number of Digital Media Broadcasting (DMB) devices available in world. And it seems that history is repeating itself; there are a number of different, incompatible formats available.

Why can't we just get along? Why can't everyone just agree on a standard way of doing things so that everyone's device can receive the same broadcasts any where in the world. In that way world travelers could carry one piece of gear that would work everywhere. Wouldn't that be a perfect world?

Actually, that is probably never going to happen on any kind of consumer equipment and we are certainly better off (in the long run) for that. You see there is always more than one way to solve a problem, especially when people can not even get together on what the definition of the problem is. There are lots of smart people out there trying to make a workable gadget to do whatever (hand held digital televisions in this case) and they are going to find a number of different ways to deal with what they think the problem is. Some of the solutions will be more elegant than others. Some solutions will look better. Some solutions will use less energy (read longer battery life). Other solutions will just catch the attention of the In people.

As time goes by the number of solutions for a particular problem will decrease as the battle for market place supremacy goes on. Some of the drop outs will be too complicated for the average user, others will not solve enough of the common problems, and others will cause problems that were not foreseen in the design phase. But finally, the world will be whittled down to two or three good solutions to the problem. These two or three will trade market share back and forth as each makes incremental improvements to their solution, piggybacking on the latest work done on the others.

You see, if we did not have the multiple DMB formats and equipment, there would be no incentive to make improvements to what was selling now. Too few people would be burning the midnight oil to make something new, something better. We would all still be watching black and white television by RCA and listening to 33 rpm long play records on the Motorola. And what fun would that be?