Coming second to a market such a mobile TV usually offers you a little hindsight with which to overtake the pioneers, but Siano Mobile Silicon has been through a long dry spell as a multi-platform mobile TV chip supplier, and until this week had only signed ZTE as a major customer.
Previously it had a win at Intel’s Xscale chip division before it was sold to Marvell Semiconductor, where it may still be used. First to market DiBcom had previously far headed off Siano at every pass among the major handset providers. In February, Siano and ZTE launched a DVB-H phone in Italy using Siano’s mobile TV receiver chip.
But this week Siano stepped into the Taiwanese DVB-H trials with local phone maker BenQ, signing a chip supply deal with BenQ for phones coming out during 2008.
Taiwan began looking in earnest at DVB-H over a year ago with a Nokia driven trial and now there are live DVB-H trials there through local incumbents Fareastone, Taiwan Mobile and Chunghwa Telecomm, but recently one faction of broadcasters put its weight behind a rival MediaFLO trial involving Taiwan Television Enterprise and China Network Systems.
The winner in Taiwan will be a good indicator of how mobile TV markets will go given this is the first time it has genuinely gone head to head.
Siano will now provide the chip base for BenQ to make a bid for part of the Chunghwa DVB-H business there using its P51 smartphones. Motorola is also known to be bidding DVB-H handsets in Taiwan. It is widely expected that DVB-H will get the nod, but it is possible that MediaFLO technology may get the opportunity to lead a rival network.