This seems so easy and straightforward that it is surprising that no-one else thought about that earlier. The current two ways of bringing mobile TV to your cell phone either use up the precious and hard-to-get data bandwidth of the 3G networks, or use one of the mentioned satellite or terrestrial technologies such as DVB-H or Qualcomm's MediaFlow. The latter two require lots of investment into new infrastructure, provooking the question who was going to pay for that? Mobile operators or broadcasters, Qualcomm of course, but otherwise, probably, nobody. If Samsung's approach is indeed working, as seems likely, then we might soon get a nice additional service onto our mobile phones, such as local weather and news etc., plus probably some ads to pay for the delivery (of course the service could also be paid for without ads). The nice aspect of this idea is that it seems simple to do on both sides: the mobile handset makers include a chip and the broadcasters just have to do what they do anyway best: create and broadcast content for mobile phone users as well, and collect ad money for doing so.

I am sure NOKIA would not mind either since they could better sell their new entertainment handsets (Zeiss optics included) better and would not have to wait until DVB-H and DMB find investing operators or broadcasters. Of course the DMB and DVB-H folks would look pretty lonely suddenly and might just see their investments disappear over night. Next week at the CES show in Las Vegas Samsung might say some more about this all, and then maybe we will be better able to judge if it is indeed earthshaking news for mobile TV.