TV On The Go

For as long as I can remember, I have had a fascination with the idea of "Portable TV". From playing with my Dad's black & white hand-held TV to the time when my parents got me my first hand-held Casio TV when I was around 12, I would persistently attempt to pick up any and every TV station that I could, despite our remote location out in the middle-of-nowhere East Texas.

Then, as time passed my fascinations seemed to pass from new laptops that could play DVDs to portable DVD players, all of which kind of pushed the idea of hand-held TVs into the "Old School" area of my mind. And then, a few years back I had my first run-in with an Archos portable media player... my childhood fascinations came back with a fury. Within months, everyone was announcing their portable media devices: Cell Phones with video, iPod Video, PDAs with video, Smart Phones with Video... and the list went on. It seemed that every corner I turned, there was a new multi-media device popping up capable of not only playing your TV shows, but your movies as well! But even in the midst of all of this, I remember asking myself, "Why would anyone want to watch TV on their Cell Phone?" It never even dawned on me that I had always secretly wanted was finally here!

My fascination with this was sparked again when I learned about two new ways not only to get TV shows and movies on the go, but actual live TV. The first comes from Sony with their A910 Walkman with TV recording. [Thanks to MacNN] It's the third model in Sony's video-capable Walkman line, and comes with a built-in 1Seg tuner and an electronic programming guide allowing it to not only receive, but also play digital over-the-air broadcast TV on its 2.4-inch LCD and encode the shows on the go as permanent copies stored in the device's internal memory. Sony reports that up to 100 hours of footage can be saved on a 16GB player. The player also has a built-in noise canceling feature which reportedly eliminates background sound while watching TV or listening to music. It looks like the new Walkman will come in three sizes: 4GB, 8GB and 16GB, and is capable of playing all the pre-recorded formats of Sony's latest players, including H.264 and MPEG-4 video as well as AAC, MP3 and WMA music. On the downside, it's only going to be available in Japan with the possiblity of a U.S. release sometime next year. The question will be whether or not the 1Seg will be included when it comes to our side of the world. It would be unfortunate if it was removed.

The second device that caught my attention is announcement of a new Application for BlackBerry phones. [Thanks toSlingPlayer Mobile Engadget] There's no timetable on when this will be released, but I love the idea of being able to control and watch my home TV while I'm out and about. SlingPlayer Mobile also supports Palm and both the Smartphone and Pocket PC versions of Windows Mobile.

My hopes are high, and fingers crossed for a capability like this for my iPhone. While watching my TV shows and movies on my phone is cool, I would love the ability to watch live. If for no other reason, just to be able to do it.