The image of the European Commission suddenly abandoning its ‘open’ principles and insisting that mobile TV services in Europe are based on DVB-H, has caused comment, uproar and consternation this week, but I should elicit little surprise.
Korea, Japan and China have all chosen standards for mobile TV that should lead to an advantage for their home grown industry, and in the US, this process has happened in its own very commercial manner. MediaFLO was a standard based largely on DVB-H, built on the work that has been going on for 7 years within the DVB Project and especially helped along by Nokia.
Qualcomm simply took the idea, changed a number of the details, and claimed a new piece of intellectual property, and in an act of audacity that you have to admire, decided it would build its own mobile TV network. In doing so it took all the risk away from its customers, Verizon and AT&T, for building their own network, and managed to sign them up blocking DVB-H from the US landscape.
Qualcomm’s next step has been to take that same MediaFLO system and take it back to the countries where DVB-H originated, to sell it in competition there.
Under these kinds of commercial conditions it’s not very surprising that Europe has temporarily dropped its ‘open’ principles and begun to apply its own political backing to support an open standard which is in danger of being overrun by systems which are either backed by other governments, or which are based on its own technology.
The simple truth is that there’s little to choose between the ability of the two broadcast systems DVB-H and MediaFLO, to carry bits efficiently, despite the continual harping on about the superiority of MediaFLO by Qualcomm. Both can carry 20 or more TV channels at QVGA in an 8MHz radio channel, and technologists tell us that this is just the start, and that with continual tuning this could eventually go as high as 35 TV channels.
And although, through the auspices of the FLO Forum, Qualcomm is claiming retrospectively that what began as a proprietary system is now an ‘open’ standard, it is an open standard developed entirely by non-European businesses with a view to usurp the strength of DVB-H on its home turf.
Also the press are seeing this as a face off between two commercial interests, Nokia and Qualcomm, and we must remember that Nokia is suing Qualcomm for patent infringement, specifically over MediaFLO with respect to its own IP data casting patents. In truth any mobile TV system probably requires the patent base of both Nokia and Qualcomm, since many of radio’s commonly used forward error correction (FEC) patents lie with Qualcomm and IPDC relies on FEC.
But this is not really just about Nokia and it’s not really just about Europe. America has never really joined the bandwagon of international standards, when those standards originate outside of the US. In cellular telephony they largely shifted to CDMA, invented by Qualcomm, and paid the price that US handsets could never roam with overseas systems until Quad band phones came into use. In digital TV the US opted for ATSC, with just a handful of countries agreeing to use it, in digital radio again it opted for HD radio, a convenient but less efficient way for digital and analog radio to live side by side, which makes it good for transition, but perhaps not really quite such a neat system as DAB, which came out of Europe.
The same might be said of ATSC 8VSG, which is a new technology for bundling a mobile TV signal alongside a digital broadcast TV signal, being pushed by Harris and LG in the US. This uses the same infrastructure, with an extra digital exciter, and a special filter, but the widespread take up of it would mean spreading mobile TV channels up and down the breadth of UHF spectrum from 450 MHz to over 800MHz.
The European digital TV standard DVB-T could also have chosen to do that, but the fact that it hasn’t demonstrates something about the two cultures. The US likes the idea of a standard where each TV channel can do its own thing, and fight it out in an entrepreneurial fashion. Europe instead likes the idea of building a new single multiplex co-operatively, a step that allows a significant amount of multiplexing and therefore spectrum savings, much like MediaFLO.
Where there was one analog TV channel in Europe, there are now 6 digital DVB-T channels, shared between various broadcasters. You could take this to the extreme and where there were analog channels, these could be replaced by a single HD copy of the signal, an SD copy and a mobile version, all in the same spectrum which held the analog, with room left over for some data delivery. That would not throw up any kind of digital dividend and it is very much the position of the tail wagging the dog. All the power here would be vested among broadcasters, and mobile network owners would have no say in what programming was broadcast and which business model it was delivered under.
For DVB-H, perhaps Europe under-estimated how long it would take to agree on issuing spectrum and on managing spectrum harmonization in Europe, and to agree on how the new spectrum was split into channels, and on who gets to choose which programming is delivered. Perhaps it also under-estimated the speed at which some other cultures can move. So the European mobile TV effort is in danger of being overtaken by technologies which have really only been spawned, in response to DVB-H.
It should have been obvious that the various technological power blocks around the planet were not going to suddenly open up and become open to free trade with an ‘open’ standard like DVB-H.
Why should Nokia or any of the other companies that are pushing DVB-H have thought for one moment that this was the technology that would finally open the door to the lucrative US market? It hasn’t happened on DVB technologies (although there has been harmonization in DVB-S and DVB-C satellite and cable standards, but that was mostly under the direction of US interests).
So in the end, as we said earlier, it should come as no surprise that Europe may go as far as mandating a single home grown standard against its usual principles.
Europe has 27 member states and most of them speak different languages. If they also each chose their own cellular technology, there would be no roaming, and virtual telecommunications chaos. As it is by pushing DVB-H, the European Commission hopes that there will actually be roaming between each country so that a mobile phone that receives TV services in one country, will also get them in another.
This is a little disingenuous, because mostly there would be similar programming, but in a different language, which is only good for multi-lingual customers, of which there aren’t so many.
And given that most European states see TV as a subscription service rather than free to air supported by advertising, then when you roam to another country, you would have to subscribe to pay a second time to subscribe to another service, unless there is roaming on subscription agreements from multinational content businesses. Instead that’s an argument in favor of ‘placeshifting,’ through the handset and that’s another technology entirely, so that home programming can reach you abroad using mobile broadband services.
Neither is, as we have said, is all about Europe. DVB-H has been tried or installed in places like Australia, Qatar, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan and Vietnam to name but a few, and has been discussed in some 60 countries as a natural follow on to adopting the DVB Project broadcasting technologies, such as DVB-T.
To be honest there is some mitigation of costs between DVB-H and DVB-T, which comes from using power supplies, towers and cabling in DVB-T sites for DVB-H installation. But there is really not much more cost mitigation than would be achieved by MediaFLO, or that achieved by DVB-H being installed in territories which run ATSC. The big buy-in is to the market for common equipment, which will eventually make DVB-H chips cheaper to make than most other mobile TV chips, as it is set to take around 50% of the world market in mobile TV.
But even in all these European and overseas markets, it is not necessarily European companies that are winning contracts for DVB-H. Certainly Thomson and Nokia Siemens and Rohde and Schwarz are among the companies vying for these contracts (European), but just as frequently we hear names like Harris, Samsung, BenQ, MobiTV, Motorola and of course Qualcomm, which now makes a handset chip that can be used for either MediaFLO or DVB-H, so mostly American, Korean and Chinese interests.
We wouldn’t go so far as saying that the European Commission sees itself as being forced to be protectionist, in order to ensure that Europe benefits from an open standard, but it will see its decision something like that.
So what exactly has the European Commission actually done to mandate DVB-H in its own countries, and by extension, keep open most of these foreign markets for a common mobile TV standard?
It has published DVB-H in the Official Journal of the European Communities, which means that member states are ‘supposed’ to use these standards before looking elsewhere. Does that mean that they have to ask the European Commission’s permission when they install another technology? Well not exactly, but the Commission would expect that spectrum allocated for mobile TV was issued with a license that mandated DVB-H and where it didn’t, it would consider its options.
If it thought the circumstances merited intervention, it has the power to mandate the technology that is used with a spectrum auction.
Now the last time a single unified European standard was created it was 3G UMTS, and that was an unmitigated disaster, especially when CDMA came along and proved that it was ready for prime time far sooner. Obviously specifying a technology which is unproven is not conducive to good business. But when Europe did this for GSM, the previous cellular technology, it was a massive success.
DVB-H is already working and so it’s not a technology that is unready. If you saw a MediaFLO service in the US, and then came to Europe and saw a DVB-H system, they’d be close enough in usage and quality that a user would think they were the same technology. They are both more or less ready, and the DVB-H eco-system is slightly ahead in terms of its development.
So Europe sees this more as another example of GSM’s success rather than 3G’s failure.
The Commission may request that standards are drawn up by more standards organizations so instead of just ETSI under which both DVB-H and T-DMB are mobile TV standards, it might add the weight of the European Standards Organizations (CEN), and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC).
What the European Commission has also done is remind everyone of the rules for Europe whereby it has the power to make a standard compulsory if the use of other standards will mean that there are no benefits of device interoperability across member states. It hasn’t said DVB-H IS compulsory, just that it might be forced to make it so.
Effectively it is saying to the community, give us a very good reason why we should not make DVB-H compulsory for your network.
Our take is that this is NOT designed to crush MBMS, the multicast standard which allows cellular base stations to isolate a piece of the cellular spectrum and use it to broadcast TV signals. Because that’s likely to hurt European companies like Ericsson, and it’s a technology that can be used alongside DVB-H. Similarly the European created Alcatel-Lucent DVB-SH, which is part of the DVB standard anyway and which allows for a system where terrain considerations suggest that satellite delivery would be useful.
The right system of mobile TV for any given country will always depend not just upon its terrain, but also on existing spectrum allocations, overall citizen wealth, population density, mobile device penetration and the existing technology history and supplier allegiances of its operators.
And given that the UK and Germany already have a digital audio multiplex given partially over to delivering mobile TV in 1.55 MHz slices that have been allocated to DAB across Europe, we don’t think T-DMB is specifically banned. We note that RAI broadcasting in Italy is in the middle of following these two other countries.
What might get the European Commission in a lather is the allocation of a full 8MHz analog TV channel in multiple contiguous 1.55 MHz slices being turned over to T-DMB, in either UHF or L-Band spectrum. Then it might raise the issue of mandating DVB-H for the sake of European interoperability.
The same is likely to be true for MediaFLO, or the new STiMi technology which is part of the China Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting (CMMB) standard.
There is no need to legislate against ISDB-T or variations on ATSC, since there is already widespread adoption of DVB-T in Europe and around 35 other countries.
So expect loud cries of ‘foul’ from Qualcomm and the FLO Forum, as well as Word DMB and even from operators that are a long way down the track with any of these such as the UK’s News Corp owned BSkyB.
The one area that these opposing factions can point at as a weakness for DVB-H is that of intellectual property. Nokia does not hold all of the IPR involved in DVB-H and it all needs to go into a single consolidated patent pool and be licensed for a reasonable amount in order to quiet any dissenting voices. The Commission has specifically promised to see that through, but it may not be quite so easy.
Qualcomm itself may lay claim to some of the technology within DVB-H and it would have a vested interest in making the European technology appear expensive, so it might play nasty on this issue.
We have even heard Qualcomm executives stating that MediaFLO is cheaper to license than DVB-H. This is fairly laughable coming from a company that is infamous for its approach to leveraging its intellectual property. However MediaFLO has been licensed for zero costs to a few chip makers.
There remains the potential to damage DVB-H irreparably through an intellectual property battle over who owns DVB-H technology. If it turns out that Qualcomm can lay any claim, it will ensure that it prices it off the graph. While Nokia plans to do the same in the US. Which is why the legal action between Nokia and Qualcomm over mobile TV technology was both inevitable, and it becomes vital to the future of global mobile TV.