Television took another step toward the mobile handheld market this week at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Las Vegas when a handful of industry players announced their support for the Digital Video Broadcast – Handheld (DVB-H) standard.

Crown Castle Mobile Media, DiBcom, Freescale, Intel, Microtune, Nokia, O2, S-Communications, Silicon & Software Systems, Texas Instruments, TTPCom and UDcast all came out to back DVB-H, an open standard for the delivery of mobile broadcast digital TV (DTV) in the United States, European and Asian marketplaces.

DVB-H competes with Qualcomm's proprietary standard, which the company has already begun to launch with in the US, among other mobile-broadcasting technologies such as Terrestrial-Digital Mobile Broadcast, Japan's Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial and South Korea's Satellite-Digital Mobile Broadcast standards.

The 12 DVB-H companies have partnered in the hopes that promoting an open, non-proprietary market will accelerate TV on the mobile, a largely un-tapped but promising industry, according to IDC.

The research house expects TV on the mobile to attract more than 30 million users by 2009 for revenue topping $3bn. With an average revenue per unit (ARPU) nearing $10 per subscriber per month by that time, commercial video and television could emerge as the single largest mobile phone-oriented ARPU driver among consumers outside of voice, the firm said.

Getting the products from manufactures to carriers and into consumers' hands won't be a problem, according to Edwin Hilkens, senior directory of product development at Freescale Semiconductor, as he sees a clear marketability for TV on the mobile.

"It's really uniting the two most important consumer devices out there – the television and the cellular phone. The combination opens up even more [revenue] opportunities there for everyone in the mobile TV food chain," Hilkens said, noting content creators, carriers and handset manufacturers. 

The largest obstacle to mobile TV is spectrum allocation, he believes.

"The government has to allocate spectrum for these kinds of services. Since DVB-H is built upon DBTV [the terrestrial version] and DBTV has been deployed in big parts of Europe and some parts of Asia that means it has already gone through spectrum allocation and DVB-H can just be an additional increment. Also DVB-H and DBTV can co-exist on one channel, so there is no extra issue to allocate that one channel," he said.

Here in the United States, Crown Castel bought spectrum for the for DVB-H, securing a place for the standard in the market.

"The United States digital TV standard was never made to handle mobile devices, and the signal when you're traveling at high speed just degrades. So the US was wide open for adopting a mobile TV standard. That's one of the reasons Qualcomm decided to deploy first in the United States and it's the same reason Crown Castle went and bought spectrum to roll out a DVB-H network," Aaron Shagrin, manager of strategy and business development at Freescale, noted.

DVB-H trials are under way in the US, Germany, France, UK, Finland, Sweden and other countries, with more trials expected to launch later in 2005 and throughout 2006. Wider roll-out of DVB-H services is expected in 2006 and throughout 2007.

"2005 will be mostly trials. We see it catching on for the world soccer games in Germany in 2006 -- that's when the market will really start," Hilkens concluded.

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