Apple gave Verizon (apparently) and AT&T a take-it-or-leave-it deal with the iPhone which served to break up the walled-garden somewhat. Until then, for instance, if you wanted to watch a video on your AT&T phone you couldn’t to go.

There will be over 54 million phones shipped this year receiving analog TV and all of them are powered by Telegent. But that’s a tiny bit of their potential market since there are something like 5B people in the world who have a cell phone but no access to mobile TV. In fact, in many cases, no access to TV at all. Buying a phone with TV capability may be their only way to get a television. So despite the world going digital, both Instat and Forward Concepts are forecasting that analog TV will dominate the market for the time being.

Their end customer are the cell-phone manufacturers who see this as the first new feature that they can add to phones, especially low-end phones, since mp3 players many years ago. It gives them differentiation and, since They started 5 years ago with the Chinese market as their first target. They always knew that their customers would primarily be overseas, at least for these initial products. Since then they have expanded into Latin America, South East Asia, Middle East, Russia. In China, since, as I said above, the average cell-phone customer changes their phone every 6 months, this has meant that adoption has been driven very fast without needing to wait years for the installed base of handsets to turn over.

It has also turned out to be a big asset in emergencies. In the recent earthquake in Sichuan the only way people were getting information at all was on their mobile phone TV since so many cell-phone towers had been destroyed, but over-the-air TV could be picked up from as far away as Taiwan. The Telegent mobile TV chip has better sensitivity than most normal TVs plus, for several hours of watching, didn’t require the power grid to be working.

They are moving into digital TV and, as they do, the US market will start to become more important. Te1legent want to get TV into every laptop too, since with a bigger battery and a bigger screen it will be a better experience. Their goal in life is to make every LCD flatpanel into a TV: cellphones, laptops, displays, photo-frames, DVD players.

- By Amanda Chan