How many standards does the world need for mobile television?
Well apparently, despite the abundance of current offerings, at least one more as US-based industry organisation ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) announced last week it is developing yet another standard for mobile TV.
“The ATSC-M/H standard will facilitate broadcasters’ use of their digital TV broadcast channels to provide new services directly to small handheld receivers, laptop computers and vehicles moving at a high rate of speed,” said ATSC president Mark Richer.
This technology will join the ranks of competing mobile TV standards, which include Europe’s DVB-H,
DVB-SH and DAB-IP, Korea’s T-DMB and Qualcomm’s MediaFLO.
Last month the European Commissioner for telecoms, Viviane Reding, called on the industry to agree on
a single standard for mobile TV, preferably DVB-H. While, in theory, the industry seems to consider this a good idea, it is obviously never going to happen - as this news illustrates.
UK-based Rok Entertainment provides on-demand TV to mobiles over the existing 2.5G and 3G networks. It believes discussion over which broadcast standard is used is pretty much irrelevant.
“The mistake big carriers are making here is assuming you can simply put what’s on your widescreen plasma screen at home onto the mobile phone in full,” said Bruce Renny, marketing director for Rok. “People won’t be prepared to pay anything more than a token amount for the reception of that.”
Renny said people watch mobile TV for a few minutes at a time with peak viewing occurring during work commuting hours so the content must be immediately engaging.
“This is an on-demand world and people are prepared to pay for the freedom of on-demand. The cost of the networks, whether DVB-H, MediaFLO or whatever, is going to be a significant cost and people will have a low perceived value of it.”