IT IS the innovation that ensures you need never miss EastEnders again — a mobile phone with live BBC television too.

The broadcaster has joined forces with O2, the mobile operator, to produce a handset that is intended to allow Britons to watch everything from their favourite soap to the Ten O’Clock News on the move.

Trials of the new service — which features 14 television channels including CNN and MTV alongside BBC One and Two — began in Oxford last week. A hopeful O2 was not mincing its words — one day, it reckons, mobile television will be “as big as text messaging”.

The phone, from Nokia, is chunky but the picture is large and consistently clear — a big improvement on rival offerings, where a slight movement by the user causes the picture to fuzz or disappear altogether.

On the face of it, the British mobile company is a latecomer to the race to put television on your phone. Orange, the French-owned operator, has already launched a mobile television service with nine channels. Virgin Mobile is also involved in a pilot with BT.

However, the O2 project is different. Instead of streaming television over the third-generation (3G) network like Orange, O2 is using Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld (DVB-H), an emerging standard in which a television signal is beamed to an additional digital TV receiver hidden in the handset.

Analysts agree that the technology has benefits over 3G because broadcasting to a mass audience can put the telecoms network under severe strain.

James Barford, at Enders Analysis, the telecoms research group, explains: “We estimate a 3G network can support only about 100,000 television customers, which is not exactly mass market. The problem is that watching television takes up a lot of capacity.”

Orange recently launched trials of DVB-H in its home country, France — a tacit recognition, say analysts, that 3G technology is not sustainable for television in the long term.

Unfortunately, there are several huge obstacles to DVB-H becoming a commercial reality. The correct spectrum — band 4 and 5 ultra high frequency (UHF), which is regarded as the ideal frequency for mobile television broadcasts — needs to be made available. The spectrum being used in the Oxford trial has been temporarily licensed by Ofcom.

The communications regulator says that the right airwaves for mobile television, currently used for analogue and digital television, will become available only once the switchover to digital — which will take place between 2008 and 2012 — is under way. It will therefore only be available in most major cities in the next decade.

The roll-out of the O2 project is fraught with licensing issues too. The BBC has had to negotiate a special deal with programme-makers for the duration of the Oxford trial to ensure that the entire BBC One and Two schedules are available on the special phones.

A full commercial launch would require the broadcaster to work through deals with each programme-maker to ensure that it is not in breach of their intellectual property. “If and when the phone is made available commercially then we would need to make decisions,” a BBC spokesman says.

DVB-H also needs a new broadcast network, with up to 3,000 new masts. This would cost over £250 million.

And what of the demand for mobile television? Nokia, which is also a partner on the project, produced a survey on users in a recent trial in Helsinki which found that people wanted the service and would be willing to pay up to €10 (£6.50) a month for it. Some Finns were even charged during the trial.

Analysts remain sceptical. John Delaney, principal analyst at Ovum, says: “Getting people to say they like the idea of mobile television is different from getting them to go out and buy a new phone on which the service works — and getting them to pay for it.”

David Williams, chief technology officer at O2, is adamant that the attempt to promote the television service is not an admission that 3G has failed. “The service is complementary to our third-generation offering,” he says.

Having failed to reap the hoped-for rewards from the £22.5 billion 3G licences, the mobile phone companies continue to search for the “killer” mobile application. Yet, if real money is to be made from broadcasting TV to the mobile, then it is some years off.

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