LONDON -- Motive Television PLC, is working with Granite Broadcasting to delivery live broadcast television to tablet devices. Motive, a London-based television software and services company, announced plans to install a full-featured demonstration of its technology that delivers live broadcast television and video-on-demand to tablets and smartphones in San Francisco beginning mid 2013. This is expected to be followed by a market field test with tablet TV equipped “T-Pods” later in the year and thereafter a commercial rollout.
As the next step in development, Tablet TV LLC, a joint venture between Motive Television and Granite Broadcasting in the United States, will unveil a pilot demonstrating the full suite of the Tablet TV features, broadcast directly to tablets over the standard live ATSC digital terrestrial signal. The consumer features available on tablets will be live viewing of local broadcast stations, recording of live television with PVR functionality, datacast delivery of video-on-demand content, and integrated social media. All of this will be done in the heart of Silicon Valley at Granite’s KOFY-TV station in San Francisco.
Motive said this move represents “the completion of a major milestone as the Tablet TV team, who will have successfully ported Motive Television’s patented technology, that has been in large-scale commercial use in TV broadcasting in Europe since 2009, to tablets using the ATSC broadcast standard.”
This technological breakthrough permits tablet users to view all television broadcasts receivable from public and commercial television stations in their city and the ability to time-shift the viewing of these programs. In addition, Motive’s patented Television Anytime Anywhere software will make possible video-on-demand catch-up and additional movies and television programs directly to the fastest-growing viewing devices – iPads and Android tablets.
An application for a patent of the Tablet TV technology has been filed with the U.S. Patent Office and further patent applications will follow.
“The demonstration pilot at KOFY in San Francisco is the next step in readying Tablet Television for the U.S. market introduction,” said Leornard M. Fertig, CEO of Motive. “Tablet TV continues to move toward its launch and becoming a significant player in delivering content to the fastest growing segment of television viewing. It will permit the television industry to see Tablet TV in action, prove Tablet TV’s technical capabilities in a television broadcast environment, and make our consumer appeal apparent.”
Peter Markham, chairman of Granite Broadcasting said Granite was working on ways to reach the “exponentially growing number of tablet screens.”
