Cellular market leader in Russia, VimpelCom looks set to dive into the DVB-H mobile TV marketplace, if a report in Network World Russia is to be believed, citing high ranking VimpelCom officials saying a Moscow network will be ready by the first quarter in 2008.
Anywhere else in the world it would take a year to get the license, a year to get the civil permissions for transmitters, and 6 months to plan the networks and another 6 months to build it. It looks like VimpelCom has been able to miss out all but the last stage and is building like crazy as we write this.
Moscow is only 1,000 square kilometers and given that not too many buildings are skyscrapers there, a high powered single transmitter, with 30 or 40 gap fillers might do the trick, costing only a few million dollars in equipment costs and not much more in labor, planning and tower rights.
However the bulk of costs will be in DVB-H devices, which often need to be subsidized, and at least two other companies are likely to have targeted Moscow. That means that Moscow is likely to become one of the key multi-supplier markets overnight, offering up two or three separate clusters of channels to its 12.6 million inhabitants.
VimpelCom purchased Dominanta last December, a private company with UHF TV spectrum and will use this for DVB-H spectrum. Already in Russia Spain’s Sidsa is building a system in Yekaterinburg (Ekaterinburg) in Sverdlovsk, not exactly a huge market; while Teleset is building a DVB-H trial Kaliningrad; and Nokia and Rohde and Schwarz have helped Digital Teleradiobroadcasing build a trial in Moscow. It is likely that this trial provides some, if not all, of the technical data to give VimpelCom and others the confidence to launch DVB-H services in Moscow, and it may well be a win for Nokia at the handset and system level.
But the big effort in Russia so far is from AFK Sistema, the Russian owner of cellular operator MTS, which has openly said it will spend $200 million building out DVB-H in Moscow plus 16 other 1 million inhabitants plus Russian cities.
Sistema has been saying that this is it’s plan for over a year, but back in April, it hit something of a roadblock when negotiations seemed to be going sour with the Russian Television and Radio Broadcasting Network (RTRS), a core Russian TV and radio broadcaster, which Sistema needs access to in order to build out cheaply with its chosen DVB-H technology. RTRS at the time said that it would not give access to Sistema unless it agreed to enter into a joint venture with RTRS, but some kind of deal was done here in June and building seems to have started.
Sistema also said that it would have its system up in the first quarter of 2008, and although they are clearly talking about different networks, there is a possibility, as there was in Italy, that multiple companies could co-operate in a single network. In Italy two separate DVB-H networks were built, but one is being shared between Telecom Italia and Vodafone having been built by broadcaster MediaSet. The dominant network is run by 3 Italia which has over 500,000 customers.
The VimpelCom system will be launched under the Bee-Line brand, and subscriptions will be sold for €15 a month, and the company says it will have in-building coverage and will begin by ordering 100,000 handsets and will re-market them for €250 each with no subsidy.
A third player, Mobile TeleSystems, one of VimpelCom’s main Russian competitors, has also made public references to building its own DVB-H network, though no detail is currently available, while Megafon Moscow, says it will use cellular delivery for a mobile TV service in Moscow, which may mean an MBMS service or simply cellular streaming.