I agree with Mockingbird. It's now something of a fad, that has morphed already into a trend that will finally become the way things are.
If MPH itself survives will depend on which devices are available to use it. How well it works. Lets say new phones will include it (that alone is a big if). Then if you are near the towers it will be fine. If you are on the go or want to watch cable only channels then you will pay the $10 a month or so streaming video. But as Aaron points out, why even pay for the cable channels when most with large screen phones have internet and can go to YouTube, Hulu, etc.... Then stream the program they want, not what is on TV.
But that said will it be the pay cable type service on phones that dies? If you have internet and can watch Youtube, etc, why pay for streaming video from cable channels that costs you ever month and might not have the show you want?
In that case MPH might become a better partner on handhelds than streaming cable TV, because the internet sites and MPH are free.
Still I think the single biggest obstacle to MPH will be which devices will have a receiver. I don't believe it will catch on if it requires a separate device. Today consumers want everything in one device.
Will the next I-phone say: "MPH? We have an app for that!"
Then toward the future, the G4 and G5 phones planned for the 700 MHz range (our old UHF channels) will be very close to the UHF TV channels. So it would be less work to build receivers in the phones for at least UHF MPH channels.
Which begs another thought. VHF is not going to work well on MPH, or at least in this Pig's perspective. Now imagine MPH makes a hit. What happens to those stations that ran like poker players to secure an VHF channel? Will they then have to lease bandwidth on a competitor to stream their VHF station on someone's UHF transmitter? To me that would prove to be too ironic, since I am one of the ones that said the
FCC let WAY too many stations move to VHF.
