Portable Video Exploding

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Watching television and movies on cell phone or iPod is not news anymore. Portable video is evolving more every day and there are many people who like to watch movies on their cell phone or iPod video.

With TiVo Series 2 DVR transferring movies and television shows to your cell phone or portable device can be done with TiVoToGo without additional charges. But transferring is not yet so easy. You will need to transfer the content to your computer and convert it to be compatible with your smart phone. This will require additional devices and can be very time consuming.

Additional devices capable of recording television programs to your computer are offered from ATI, Diamond, or Hauppauge, starting from about $100. The recorded program than needs to be exported in the correct format, usually QuickTime 7.0.3 or later. The same steps need to be followed when transferring home videos or other movies to cell phones.

For the moment the best way to find content for the video-capable iPod is to acquire it from the iTunes Music Store.. Here you can buy episodes from current shows like "Desperate Housewives", "Saturday Night Live" and "Commander in Chief", entire seasons, or past TV hits.

Several cell phone service providers now offer television and video content to their subscribers. Access to smart phone television content starts from $10-25/month. Cingular offers access for $10 a month to channels like Discovery Channel, Fashion TV, C-SPAN, ESPN, movie trailer channel. Sprint has three packages to its Power Vision Network starting from $15 to $25 per month from the basic channels to The Weather Channel, ESPN, Animal Planet and other TV Channels. Verizon offers news from ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC some sports programming from ESPN and Fox Sports and some entertainment from E Networks, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central.