WiMAX to support Mobile TV — Someday

It might be a couple years before you’re able to watch TV on mobile devices via WiMAX in the real world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t start talking about the possibility right now. At the big wireless show being held in Orlando this week, a partnership of WiMAX gear maker Alvarion and mobile-TV pals MobiTV and NDS did just that, plugging the idea as a way for service providers to generate more cash from their eventual WiMAX customers.

Since WiMAX holds the promise of delivering a big chunk of bandwidth, it makes sense that service providers might try to make potentially lucrative video streams part of any broadband offering. But since WiMAX providers (in the U.S., anyway) are hard to find — only Clearwire and Sprint seem to be fully committed — and chipsets to provide WiMAX for laptops and other mobile devices are only now starting to emerge, it might be a couple years at best before you’re YouTubing via WiMAX.

Alvarion, which provides a wide range of WiMAX and wireless gear for providers, teamed with News Corp subsidiary NDS (which offers software and services to enable secure pay-TV operations) and MobiTV for the demo at CTIA, but even this partnership might not stick together in a commercial setting (a spokesperson for MobiTV said there is no signed deal requiring the companies to work together).

MobiTV, which currently operates on the already available 3G cellular networks, professed its love for WiMAX earlier this year, so it already has some experience in these early-days discussions.