Do you like Mobile TV? I do 
Marino Bresciani
My first experience was in July 2006, when I was boarding to a flight to Germany, exactly at the same time of the World Cup semifinal match between Italy and Germany. I had the possibility, though, to watch most of the match in the boarding area, thanks to a DVB-H mobile phone. 2 inches-wide screens are not really much, especially if you share the vision of the match with other 5-6 passengers. But still enough to catch something.
Some months later, in Vodafone, my boss showed me the German Mobile TV – this was not DVB-H but a simple video stream played by a UMTS phone. In this case, instead, the experience was much worse… I could hardly see the ball.
Some months again, and still I tried to watch some Mobile TV, this time on a Estonian UMTS phone. Not really better.
The reason is obvious: trying to resize a video stream (intended for a 800×600 screen) into a 240×160 stream cannot be done without a huge loss in quality. But why resizing when we can actually also crop?
Well, finally (but actually I would say that a prototype of this technology was already available much time ago), some company has developed a patented application for editing/encoding video contents from TV signal to 3GPP automatically with a single shot. The coolest thing, is that at this point you can simply use an eye-tracker that automatically recognizes the position on the screen where a test user is looking at, so that it is really possible to understand where the real focus of the action is. Have a look at the screenshot!
The drawback, at least at the moment, is that such operation (clipping and resizing in real time) at that time, was still too expensive for obtaining a real live stream. But now, times are come, and the real Mobile TV is not anymore an utopia.
Ah, you do not need to spend 5000 eurs for a eye-tracker. There are head-pointers (mainly used for users with motorial disabilities) that cost much less and have much similar results. Otherwise, google around, there are applications that do the same!