There’s a lot of things keeping me from acting normally for the past weeks. ^_^. However, these won’t hinder me from blogging and at least visit some blogs and able to comment on some posts. I do have several draft posts since the start of my “so called” vacation status. Aside from these, we are still processing our SmartBRO SME application on one of Smart’s Wireless Centers. We’re hoping for an immediate approval.

This is my random post which includes 2 different topics related to my “kinaaabalahan” from the past weeks. Traffic surge to my blog due to my previous music album review posts and the Smart MyTV tests.

Traffic surge

My recent post about APO’s newest addition to their tribute album entitled Kami nAPO Muna Ulit Album gained an increase in my blog’s overall traffic for the past few weeks. Traffic that now comes from “search engines” replacing my “referral traffic” to second place again based from Google Analytics. With the help of Google Webmaster tools, most of the search returns for these particular keywords (Kami napo Muna ulit track list) made my post land on the first page. Sometimes among the top 5 to 10 search results. Same thing happened to my last week’s post about Nina’s newest Special Edition CD. Posting about new music album releases is effective if you ask me. Especially when you are among the very few who posted something about it immediately. It took just under 12 hours to notice that the keywords “Nina Barry Manilow” appeared through my web stats. I am grateful that Google spiders indexed my blog that fast.

MyTV

This past week, I’m testing Smart’s newest service named “MyTV” that let’s you watch digital video broadcast on selected mobile phones. Smart does have this subscription package that includes channels like what your local cable providers provide in your television sets. CNN, Jack TV, Cartoon Network… to name a few (I believe there are 10) are included in the myTV subscription package. The subscription rate is a per month basis which usually costs P488 for both prepaid and postpaid. Currently supported handsets are N92 and the newly released N77 of the Nokia N-Series. These handsets are able to receive DVB-H or Digital Video Broadcast signal in which the included channels under myTV are able to broadcast.

“Digital Video Broadcast – Hand held (DVB-H) is the technology driving mobile TV. A combination of conventional digital video and IP, DVB-H scales for smaller devices a technology that’s already in place in millions of TV sets worldwide.”

N92 is bulky and much heavier than the rest of Nokia’s N-Series. N77 is just released recently which features sleek design and much lighter than N92. It also offers DVB-H reception.

Setting up Smart’s myTV on N92 requires patience and an adequate signal from your mobile carrier. Since Smart broadcast this new signal transmission aside from 3G, HSDPA, GPRS, SMS, MMS and voice calls, many cable providers in the country protested against it.

“Officials of the Philippine Cable Television Association (PCTA) petitioned for the issuance of a cease and desist order against the myTV services being offered by leading telecommunications giant Smart Corp. But why? The reason? Visit this link”

We have a low penetration of Smart signal inside our house due to a factory meters behind our subdivision. We must find an exact spot where the signal is consistent just to stream digital TV broadcast.

Mobile TV application on N92 requires scanning for “program guides” to know the available channels in your mobile carrier. The subscription that was already settled and agree to had not been activated on the phone*. It requires connection to the web to download subscription user rights to watch that particular channel. Nevertheless, I’m able to watch MTV Philippines since it was one of the local channels here in the country that broadcast through DVB-H. And it is free!

“I read that ABSCBN 2 will also go digital. Will this mean that the network will go for digital streaming through DVB-H to hand held devices?

The video stream is clear and pix elations normally happen when the signal drops or interferences in the signal occurred.

*UPDATE:I just created a new subscription and able to receive activation rights from SmartBundle. What I found was that the subscription rate was 1 peso per month contrary to the P488 per month. I don’t know but that is what I saw before the channels are unlocked. So far all channels are now accessible.

Images below:

UPDATE 10/30/2007: The subscription from SmartBundle1 suddenly ended for no apparent reason. I’m receiving “Preview Ended” message on the mobile phone whenever I watch unlocked cable channels. Now that is locked again, I try to re-activate it but haven’t succeeded. I’m still seeing SmartBundle1 continuous indicated under subscriptions. But why? MTV Philippines which is the default accessible channel unlocked was the only one viewable at the moment.

UPDATE 10/31/2007: We went to Smart Wireless Center in Festival Mall Alabang to inquire about the problem. We find out that the phone need to be reformatted due to a memory device error. How did it get an error? No idea actually. The next thing happened, the customer representative were able to access the channels again. Back home, I did a recap of the phone’s manual. Based on the manual, “program guides” are automatically downloaded onto the device memory whenever the Mobile TV is launched for the first time or there’s a need to in case the phone has been out of range from the DVB-H signal. This program guide eats huge amount of disk space on the device and this contains the actual updated program schedules every hour of everyday of every channel. What I know is that the phone’s program guide was corrupted somehow and that the phone can’t update the program guides in it. Without some visual notice on the phone regarding the true problem, the device only pops-out a message “Preview Ended” whenever I watch channels aside from MTV. Whenever I request for a license to view the channels, the phone returns an error “Can’t connect to SmartBundle1 server. Program guides are not up-to-date!”. See what I mean? So the best way to fix this is to reformat if somehow the phone experiences these problems again. The question is, why and how did the phone’s memory become corrupted?

UPDATE 11/02/07: The phone experienced the problem again this morning before we went to Divisoria in Binondo. We decided to go back again to Smart Wireless Center to reformat it somehow and inquire if the phone is defective. I asked this lady on the customer service area and ask her about the phone’s problem. We find out what caused the error and the help desk representative provided me with the solution if ever the error appeared again. I’ll post more about this on the 5th of November 2007.

Translate this post