ITV, the biggest commercial television network in the UK, broadcasting the most talked about television and making a major contribution to the UK’s culture, economy and communities has also became the first terrestrial broadcaster that started to broadcast its programmes on mobile phone handsets in the UK.
ITV1 which is the most popular commercial television channel in Britain watched on average by 45 million people every week and has the largest programme budget of any commercial channel in Europe and quiz network ITV Play have offered on 3 networks, with users charged daily or monthly rates. The fans of Coronation Street, The X Factor and Prime Suspect can view their favourite shows via their mobile phone handsets.
ITV network is saying that the other channels will be available in the coming months and will "roll out fairly quickly from now onwards". Further more ITV’s spokeswoman advised that the service would be available to nearly 90% of the UK's population.
The new technology attracts most of the broadcasters as the statistics shows.
O2, a leading provider of mobile services to consumers and businesses in the UK, a leader in non-voice services and data connections via GPRS, 3G and WLAN made an experiment on around 400 people who were access to 16 channels. The results revealed by this experiment are astonishing showing that 80 per cent of participants would subscribe to a mobile TV service if it was available.
Sky joined with Vodafone and launched a 19-channel mobile service while BT offered video from Sky News, Channel 4 and Cartoon Network.
BBC was not out of the competition offering pre-recorded content for mobiles including bonus clips to accompany Rob Brydon's BBC Three comedy Annually Retentive.
The bad news for the fans of the new technology who already started to watch programmes on mobile phones or computers is that they will need a TV licence to do it because these broadcasts are governed by the same rules as traditional television sets. The TV Licensing advised that the ones that don’t pay for the TV licence may face fines of Ł1,000.
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