Every day in Switzerland, 40,000 people watch a 100-second television news broadcast on their cellphones. In Italy, a million people pay as much as 19 euros each a month to watch up to a dozen mobile TV channels and in the Netherlands Vodafone and KPN are also starting with mobile TV.

Mobile TV, the kind that is watched on a cellphone, is spreading beyond Japan and South Korea, where it has been available for about three years. Mobile operators across Europe and the United States are investing in new broadcasting towers, mobile devices, and television programming and promotions, even though it is not yet clear that profit will follow.

The European video broadcasts use a standard called DVB-H, short for Digital Video Broadcasting for Hand-helds, which was developed by the DVB Project, a group of 275 media , entertainment and telecommunications companies based in Geneva. But for this DVB-H standard you need a phone that has a DVB tuner inside and you’ll need to pay for it.

But what if you got your brand new device and it hasn’t got a DVB-H tuner or you don’t want to spend a lot of money on just a few channels? Well the solution might P2P tv. This phenomenon has been going on for years now on the internet. Programs like TVUplayer, TVants, SOPcast and PPlive/PPstream are well known and very popular. Most people use these programs to view television that is not available in their country or to watch and share movies, sports and pay-to-view channels. A lot of popular channels are available in different quality streams. FOX, ABC, Eurosport, Sky Sports, it’s all there.

Other solutions are also available. Applications that serve you internet livestreams of your favorite tv stations. Vimio, LiveTV and dailyme.tv are doing already and it seems to be working very well. They offer livestreams in low, med and high quality so you can choose according to your current internet connection.

Below are some of the applications you could use to have live tv on your mobile device:

Symbian

Windows Mobile

iPhone

  • iTV – (search for it in app store)

Direct links to live channels: