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Hands On With Dyle TV and the Samsung Lightray 4G

The first Dyle TV phone, with free broadcast TV, is here from MetroPCS. We check it out.

August 3, 2012

The third first mobile TV phone is here. Yes, you read that right; the first phone with Dyle Mobile TV, the Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G for MetroPCS, is the third major attempt in the past six years at getting Americans to watch TV on their phones. And while the phone itself is overpriced and the service is severely short on channels, I think Dyle has a better chance than previous efforts of surviving - because it has to.

The Galaxy S Lightray 4G
The Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G is a hacked Samsung Droid Charge (Verizon Wireless), with a retractable 7-inch antenna extendable from the top right corner, for $459. That's $210 more than the excellent , so the price would suggest a top-of-the-line smartphone. This isn't a top-of-the-line smartphone. Rather, you're paying a premium for the brand-new technology.

A recap: the Droid Charge Galaxy S Aviator Lightray 4G is a large but light Android 2.3-powered smartphone with speedy LTE networking and an 8-megapixel camera on the back. For more, read our and reviews, as they're all basically the same phone, or wait for our full review of this phone early next week. The phone runs on MetroPCS's inexpensive plans, starting at $40 per month including taxes.

MetroPCS has taken one for the technology team before. The was an expensive feature phone with a subpar Web browser, but it was also the first LTE phone in America. You have to respect MetroPCS for being willing to stick its neck out to push technology forward. If mobile TV becomes more popular, mobile TV phones will become cheaper.

The Lightray has two other things going for it. It has a 4.3-inch screen. According to our Readers' Choice survey, a disturbing number of consumers buy phones primarily based on screen size, so it behooves Metro to offer more big-screen phones. It's also the first MetroPCS phone to work as a mobile hotspot.

Why Dyle Mobile TV Exists
The primary reason you would want this phone over the faster, less expensive LG Connect 4G is Dyle Mobile TV, so let's take a close look at that.

Mobile TV has been failing to take off in the U.S. since 2006. First it would bring the European DVB-H system to the U.S.; it produced a prototype phone, then vanished. Qualcomm's MediaFLO and AT&T on board in 2007, never achieved critical mass, and ended in 2010. AT&T now owns the old MediaFLO spectrum.

But there's an urgency behind Dyle that makes it different. Unlike previous attempts at mobile TV, Dyle is owned by existing broadcast TV stations. Not content providers, the actual station owners. The guys with the towers and antennas. Those stations are using many megahertz of valuable radio spectrum that's being eyed hungrily by wireless companies. Cell phone companies first took the UHF TV channels 70-83 in the 1980s, and then channels 52-69 in 2008. As smartphone usage rises, broadcast TV usage remains flat, any much-hyped trends towards cable-cutting notwithstanding.

(Chart data sources: Nielsen, Comscore, CTIA)

The broadcast station owners would never admit to this, but they need to show that they're using their valuable, "beachfront" spectrum for something people actually want. Officially, they will say that they are necessary so they can broadcast emergency alerts when the apocalypse comes, but it really helps their case if people on that smartphone curve are taking advantage of some service they provide.

So Dyle (and its competitor/partner, Mobile500, a hopefully compatible service from a different group of stations) is life-and-death levels of important to these station owners. That makes it a wee bit more urgent than Qualcomm's experiment.

If Dyle succeeds, it will help the wireless carriers, too (though less than if they could get the spectrum for themselves, of course.) Streaming video content is expensive to provide over 4G, and too much streaming video can clog up a cell-phone network. Broadcast never slows down, no matter how many people are watching.

Continue Reading: Dyling It Up>

The Dyle Experience
And so we get to actually Dyling it up. Dyle currently works in 35 cities; here in New York it has four channels: NBC, Telemundo, qubo, and Ion. The channels are exactly what is showing on TV at that moment. Launch the Dyle app, enter some demographic information on first launch, pick your city and you're in.

Dyle runs a channel scan every time it launches, which can delay startup for about a minute. You can abort the scan, fortunately. You then get a program guide showing your four program choices. You can check what's on next, or search for future programs (but not browse the future freely as you can on a DVR.)

Remember that this is local TV. That means you get local news, local weather and local sports, not just national entertainment programming you can watch elsewhere. Along with the greater reliability and lower data consumption of broadcast, that's the big difference between Dyle and streaming TV services like AT&T's U-Verse Mobile TV and T-Mobile TV.

This thing works. Thanks to the fabulous building-penetrating properties of 700Mhz UHF spectrum (which is why the cell-phone companies want it) and the 7-inch antenna, I got crystal-clear NBC Olympics coverage in the middle of our labs, away from a window. Fox and Telemundo were also crystal clear, but Qubo came and went depending where I was in my office. Channel changes also take a while; I counted at least 5-6 seconds per channel switch. That makes it hard to channel surf.

The base video format here is H.264, wide screen, at 416-by-240 resolution. It doesn't look HD, but it looks more than viewable on a phone screen, and much better than some of the 320-by-240 streams that are out there right now. Rather than getting fuzzy, when reception degrades the picture becomes blocky and jittery.

It's also free. Dyle is considering adding subscription services, but not this year.

Initial Conclusions
We'll have full reviews of Dyle and the Lightray early next week, but my initial view is that this is a great proof of concept that's missing some features needed to be compelling.

The problem is that Americans have moved beyond a few linear channels of television being a killer app. For Dyle to succeed, it needs to avoid making devices more expensive. It needs to appear in affordable and leading-edge devices. It needs to have more channels, and it needs some sort of DVR functionality so you can pause your TV-watching at your desk when your boss pops up to demand a new TPS report.

That said, the folks behind Dyle and Mobile500 have a pressing need to make this work. That means ramping up programming and getting devices onto shelves - not just phones, but little boxes like the Tivit which connect to iPhones and tablets. This is step one. Qualcomm managed step one as well. That showed step one isn't enough. Now Dyle needs to move to step two.