Did your dawdling commuter train let you down again last week? Why not sit back and catch up on the latest episode of The Simpsons, broadcast direct to your mobile phone? Imagine 16-channel digital television to dip in and out of at leisure, and all for less than £10 per month. Sounds too good to be true? Frankly, it is.

Faced with the proliferating number of mobile-television services, consumers have as much chance of working out whether a mobile-television package offers good value as they have of assessing the best mobile-phone tariffs.

According to the hype, watching Sir David Attenborough reveal the balletic mating ritual of slugs on a screen the size of a matchbox is the next big leap forward in digital entertainment. “Personal TV” is the tag O2 has been putting about in recent weeks. The phone company has announced the preliminary findings of a high-tech trial involving 375 guinea pigs in Oxford, one of the first to transmit over a broadcasting standard (DVB-H), as opposed to telephony. Last September, the volunteers were given specially adapted Nokia 7710 widescreen smartphones and a choice of 16 regular channels, including the five terrestrial channels, MTV, Sky News and Discovery.

These pioneers at the digital frontier were aged between 18 and 44, and, after “snacking” on familiar shows in sessions mostly shorter than half an hour, they reported high levels of satisfaction with the embryonic service. Viewing peaked at breakfast, lunch and in the early evening, with news, soaps and music topping their charts. People found they watched on their mobile at work and on the bus but, surprisingly, mostly in the home.

Mike Short, O2 vice-president of research and development, said: “Home use exceeded expectations. People said the handset was more convenient and dad was always hogging the sports channel!” Less encouraging for mobile television were the results of another recent trial. This one, from BT and Virgin Mobile, suggested that people were more inclined to listen to digital radio than television on their handsets, typically watching just over an hour per week, as against the three hours reported by O2 in Oxford.

Nonetheless, BT says it plans to offer a service to mobile operators this summer. It exploits a radio technology called DAB-IP, which — unlike the O2 system — is available now, though it is limited by its channel capacity, and doubts about its “robustness” and precisely which areas of the UK will receive a reliable signal.

O2, Nokia and their transmission partner, Arqiva, know that their version of mobile television has little chance of getting on air this side of digital switchover in 2012, when the communications regulator, Ofcom, will sell the relevant frequencies.

The Oxford trial is designed to gauge consumer demand.

While the widescreen Nokia handset shows impressive, though imperfect, pictures, and the EU has agreed that DVB-H should be the European standard for mobile television, the truth is that we are years away from a mass market, and from a satisfactory television experience on mobiles.

Third-generation (3G) mobile video services, operated in the UK by Orange, Vodafone and 3, are extremely limited in content, slow to connect and prone to picture break-up: adequate for clips, but not for sustained viewing. Sceptics say 3G sound and picture quality is more akin to John Logie Baird’s experimental “televisor” than today’s world wide web.

A magnifying glass is needed for, say, the “breaking news” ticker on Sky News.

The success of Sony’s PSP console, probably favoured as much for watching video on the move as for gaming, indicates that people want to watch moving pictures on portable devices. Mobile-phone operators are desperate to recoup the billions they spent on 3G licences, but regulators, operators and media distributors must bang heads together if tuning a phone to the Premier League is to become as common as sending a text message. Video by telephony is costly because it is a one-to-one means of delivery. Broadcast technologies offer advantages for being “one-to-many”.

James Murdoch, who heads BSkyB (part owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Sunday Times), recently indicated his own uncertainty about the future. “The honest answer is that we don’t know yet what is going to work best, whether that is the underlying technology, the business model or the content.” He added: “Let’s not expect any one device ... to be the Swiss army knife of mobile content.”

When the head of the company that recently launched Sky Mobile is that candid, consumers know it is time to bide their time.

Steve Clarke edits Television, the journal of the Royal Television Society

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