We skipped over the item last week about EU Commissioner for Information society and Media, Viviane Reding, speaking up in support of a single European standard for mobile TV, but perhaps it’s worth a few lines to at least record the official line.
Reding was speaking at CeBIT and said she would shortly propose to the European Commission a set of measures to strengthen the Internal Market for mobile TV. Her speech was all about Europe acting swiftly, and using part of the spectrum thrown up by the 2012 analog switch off, to provide European wide DVB-H services.
Reding mentioned DVB-SH as well, but clearly called on the 27 local regulators across Europe to embrace ‘open standards’ and not to allow proprietary technologies, by which it sounded like she meant Qualcomm’s MediaFLO.
But she also issued a warning to those working out the intellectual property royalties to be charged by technologies like DVB-H, to provide early clarity on licensing terms and conditions, something that Qualcomm has been quick to point out is far from resolved.
Reding also said that she expected that the public would have little patience with strategies that meant duplicating transmission efforts and called for infrastructure sharing to be a key feature of mobile TV networks and said the was prepared to legislate to get her way on this. The implication is that if networks are built and some operators or content suppliers are not given access to them, then like the unbundling laws on DSL lines, she would mandate carriage conditions.
Cellular operators and regulators have already fought Reding over cellular roaming charges in Europe and she was forced to withdraw key European legislation at the last minute over this, and once again we cannot imagine that cellular operators want to be told what technology to be using for mobile TV by their regulators, nor forced into liaisons with local broadcasters. The entire failure during her speech to mention multicasting technologies that are coming under increasing favor by the cellular operators, purely because they don’t have to share them with broadcasters, suggests that she only has part of the picture here and that she has been the subject of an inordinate amount of lobbying from Nokia.