We’re still struggling to know what to make of the announcement that China will use a satellite, provided by an ‘affiliate’ of EchoStar, to launch mobile TV across the whole Chinese footprint.
EchoStar has a fleet of satellites, none of them, as far as we can make out, stationed above China, since they are all devoted to deliver standard and high definition TV services to customers in the US.
On its 10K form filed with the SEC, there is no mention of China, and no mention of EchoStar’s holdings in China Mobile Broadcasting Satellite (CBMSat), so we presume it’s a new initiative.
The contract has been awarded by China Satellite Mobile Broadcast a company owned by China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and TV (SARFT), which is planning to have the satellite operational in plenty of time for the 2008 Summer Olympics, using a modulation that has yet to be made fully public, and we understand it to be offering both digital SD TV as well as mobile TV using S-band spectrum, although the announcement only referred to mobile TV.
Li Zhi, Director General of SARFT’s Administrative Bureau of Radio Stations said, ‘China will launch a mobile video solution before the Beijing 2008 Olympics. We are pleased to select CMBSat to provide the satellite capacity for this project. Building an S-band satellite capable of delivering a national service across all of China is a challenging technical endeavor. CMBSat’s team has both the technical and project management skills that we deem essential in our partners.’
Last October SARFT said that STiMi technology would be the basis of its mobile TV strategy, and it halted and imposed conditions on all other existing mobile TV trials.
And last week EchoStar co-incidentally invested $40 million in the Korean S-DMB service in Korea, which uses similar technology to China’s proposed standard and which is controlled by SK Telecom, with investments by Samsung.
We noted at the time that EchoStar is not a company to take on investments just for the sake of it, and thought it would shortly make clear its strategy for mobile TV. Given its almost entirely US nature up until this point it may well turn out that EchoStar begins a mobile TV of its own in the US, perhaps using similar technology.