Here in one corner of the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention, there is an array of gadgets of the kind that could decide the way in which we watch television in years to come.

Nokia has come to show off its mobile broadcasting technology.

The mobile phone company is asking the media executives here to "imagine being ale to watch your favourite TV show, tune into news as it happens, or catch the latest sports events all on your mobile phone".

Is the small, mobile screen a realistic way forward? Nokia is using technology called IP Datacast over DVB-H, which it hopes will impress the broadcasters - the people who have to decide to use it if it is to reach consumers.

From the demonstration model here, it seems it offers the same sort of quality that you get when you view a video clip over the internet on a platform such as Real Player or Microsoft’s Media Player - there’s the odd glitchy moment, when the picture freezes, so perhaps not the ideal way to watch sport, but it’s possible to watch a news bulletin.

Nokia estimates that one in five mobile users are "highly interested" in mobile TV services, and that they would be prepared to pay around £6-£7 a month. Also, since theoretically there is no limit on the number of people who can receive content in a given area once its being broadcast, Nokia says it could be highly cost effective. The technology could deliver up to 55 channels to a mobile handset.

Meanwhile, Sony is touting its PSP. The handheld games console cannot pick up television signals yet. But according to the electronics giant, only 70 per cent of its potential is being used so far and the PSP already has a port that could allow software that could pick up TV to be added.

On the other end of the scale there’s the high definition television (HD TV) demonstrations. This is all about large screen quality and HD TV achieves this by using far more pixels and "lines" - the vertical bars which make up a television picture - than traditional screens. However, all that extra information has to be accomodated for - a technical conundrum.

The BBC has a stand where it is showing off its research on the "non-real time delivery of high definition programmes". Simply put, HD TV uses a large amount of the spectrum available for companies such as mobile phone networks and TV companies to provide their services.

Just how this commodity will be shared out by Ofcom, the communications watchdog that will make the decisions over its allocation, is unlikely to be decided for several years.

The switchover to digital TV will free up more bandwidth for digital services, such as HD TV, but that won’t be possible until after 2012 and the BBC says "it is by no means certain how any of this spectrum will be used".

In the meantime, the corporation is exploring the possibility of drip-feeding content to your home, possibly overnight, in a way that uses the available spectrum capacity as economically as possible.

So will it all be worthwhile? It will all depend on the price of the finished product but the cost of HD TV hardware is likely to drop dramatically after the first batch of technology comes out – think of how DVD players have plummeted in price. As far as the picture quality is concerned, you can really see the difference all those extra pixels make.

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