Gadgetory

back in the day you might see a car with rabbit ears clipped on it Mercury even offered a backseat TV accessory in the late 64 the most part TV in the car has been a fuzzy picture not for a lack of trying there was media flow a qualcomm technology that set out 16 channels of cable and network TV by a special slice of airwaves served up from a broadcast tower but typically received by a mobile device with a special decoder chip in it it flopped went away in 2011 local broadcasters have been uniting behind mobile DTV the future of TV is now it's what you want when and where you want it it's called mobile digital television a version of digital local television broadcasts but which are coded and signaled in a way that makes them receivable by a moving target bring your television with you with dial a derivative of that is dial which is backed by NBC and Fox dial turned your smartphone or tablet into a portable TV that means you can watch theirs and a few other local stations along with most Fox and NBC sports broadcasts but not the NFL which doesn't play ball yet however none of dials products or adapters are actually car specific there are however some off-brand car centric mobile DTV receiver boxes out there that you can wire into your car and connect permanently to the monitors in your vehicle to get a similar line up of local channels know so far that all these implementations of mobile local digital television are standard def not high def and not every market or even all the stations in a market are broadcasting this way if you're a DirecTV subscriber there's actually a dish for your car kvh has something called the track vision a7 it's about 33 inches across it roofs mounts the harder problem to solve has apparently been the price still lingers at about three thousand dollars plus not including the DirecTV subscription it needs back in August Oh seven serious began offering backseat TV a TV service via their radio satellite it has a mere three kids channels on it for an extra seven bucks a month plus the cost of installation kit it's still out there but Chrysler has stopped officially offering that's where we tried it on a ram pickup a few years ago the next evolution in the US may be what's called ATSC 3.0 that's the next version of digital TV broadcasting in the US which is expected to have strong mobile reception technology built in but it's a few years from implementation LTE stands for long term evolution others are watching a new form of 4G called LTE broadcast which would create a new layer of the 4G signal coming off the cellular tower but dedicated to sending out TV signals as a data stream though not using your personal accounts 4G data allotment nokia just started trialing this in Munich the big question of course is whether mobile DTV will even have relevance in a world rapidly moving to all kinds of internet-based Digital on-demand streaming including the content we know as TV just without the platform we know as TV