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.
www.dvb.org
www.dvb.org/index.php?id=278