TV remote control on your mobile phone
It has become an accepted norm to have multiple remote controllers in your room. One for you TV, one for DVD player, one for set-top box (not all TV functionalities are available on set-top box controller), one for your music system etc. If we turned things like word processor into an application, an alarm into an application, watch into an application etc, surely we can turn these TV remote controllers into software applications that can be downloaded on to mobile phones.
You have infrared in nearly all these devices – DVDs, TVs, music systems, mobiles. I saw one demo made by UTStarcom in China last year that integrated phone with a TV remote. It is part of the IPTV offering so that when you receive a call, there is a caller ID flashing on TV and you can take call using the phone capability integrated into the TV remote controller. Not quite what I am talking about here. I am talking about the reverse engineering. Turn remote control into a software application and put it on mobile.
I have seen a few things that get closer to doing that as well. Technology developed by TVCompass either lets service providers bundle all functionalities into one big piece of hardware like that offered by UTStarcom or you could license TVCompass technology as a content provider letting your customers download an EPG kind of application on the PDAs which then are capable of programme selection on TVs remotely using infrared. But the use of TV remote control from PDAs is limited to programme selection mostly (also recording etc).
I think these business models are a little flawed. With the latter type of model, you are offering this capability as service, bundling in the EPG. Even though we are seeing the trend of offering software as service, it is not going to apply to all scenarios. Service demands a lot of customer relations management. With this model you do not have other TV controls like volume, brightness etc. The other business model of making an all-in-one remote control + phone + other things …. If you do that, you are effectively introducing another piece of hardware in my room.
Eventually the TV remote control will be a downloadable software application on your mobile phone. Whether the operators can monetize the application somehow remains to be seen.
