The Finnish Mobile TV project spearheads pocket size television based services, and aims to answer both technical and content-based challenges in the process. The second phase of the project, the FinPilot2, focuses on the end user experience of interactive mobile TV services.
The FiMTV project developer community has discovered interactivity to be a service area, of which there still is little experience. FinPilot2 focuses on interactivity as it bears opportunities for both service providers and users.
FinPilot2 includes a two-phased target audience research on the most interesting concepts by chosen small and medium-sized enterprises and educational institutions. The project uses a local DVB-H test network provided by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, and develops it towards the existing commercial interface standard.
The new project phase has started by mapping services and concepts for which piloting will be provided by the FiMTV project, free of charge. Finnish and international companies can also submit their own services for testing by contributing to the funding of FinPilot2 with a similar sum as the current fellow corporations (Digita, Elisa, MTV Media, Nokia, Swelcom, TeliaSonera, TietoEnator and The Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE). All pilot services must at least in part by realised by a Finnish SME or educational institution.
In 2006, the first phase of the project concentrated on assisting service developers by providing DVB-H network capacity, lending mobile TV terminal device prototypes and co-ordinating the active developer forum. The project was inspired by results from an extensive user pilot project in 2005, the original FinPilot, which indicated that users are prepared to pay for mobile TV services, but also expect more variety in the content.
If You are interested in developing and testing new interactive mobile TV applications and services in the test network, please contact Kristiina Kantola at VTT (kristiina.kantola(at)vtt.fi).
