Today, cellphone users can watch prerecorded TV snippets on Sprint and Cingular's MobiTV or Verizon's Vcast. But by next year, they may be able to watch live TV content from a variety of cellular phones. As a step toward inaugurating its Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld (DVB-H) service, Houston-based Crown Castle International has licensed 5 MHz of spectrum nationwide in an FCC auction—at the surprisingly low price of $12 million. Crown Castle is testing the system in Pittsburgh now but ought to be able to deploy its signal over a wide portion of the U.S. by the end of next year. "We can conservatively fit eight TV channels and 12 audio channels in our spectrum," says Crown Castle Mobile Media President Michael Schueppert. "We still have a lot of things to pull together, like getting handsets and aggregating the content, but things are going well."
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