FIFA World Cup games will be broadcast to mobile phones in Italy using one of Europe’s first commercial DVB-H mobile TV services.
Italian mobile telecommunications service provider, Hutchison 3 Italia has teamed up with handset supplier LG Electronics to provide the DVB-H enabled mobile phones in time for the start of the broadcasts in June.
LG’s LG-U900 is the world’s first commercially available WCDMA DVB-H phone. It uses a low-power digital TV tuner chip designed by Microtune to support the DVB-H broadcasts.
Last month, Microtune announced the first TV tuner which will put Freeview digital TV services on to mobile phones in the UK.
“The TV tuner is a key electronics component in ensuring excellent TV performance. We are very pleased to be the world’s first UMTS (WCDMA) DVB-H phone manufacturer deploying Microtune’s market-proven RF technology,” said Dr. Skott Ahn, executive v-p, LG Electronics.
“To ensure true quality of reception for DVB-H devices, we designed our Mobile MicroTuner to exceed the MBRAI performance specification. With our vast experience developing tuners that detect very small signals and simultaneously manage fading conditions, 0dB echos and large adjacent channels, we believe that the MBRAI specification is, at best, a bare minimum requirement for acceptable DVB-H TV reception,” said James Fontaine, president and CEO of Microtune.
Beginning in June, Hutchison expects to broadcast the FIFA World Cup games to mobile handheld devices using the digital video broadcast handheld (DVB-H) standard.
The Mobile and Portable DVB-T Radio Access Interface Specification (MBRAI) is the DVB-H radio specification defined by the DVB Project, and it identifies the minimum performance condition within which the radio must operate to ensure conformance to the DVB-H standard.