We said back in May that the German Cartel office had better watch its step with its decision to investigate plans by Vodafone, O2 and T-Mobile to offer mobile TV in Germany in a joint venture. Failure to give it the go-ahead would have stopped mobile TV in its tracks right across Europe, since every other country has plans for multiple operators to work together on a DVB-H platform, rather than any single operator going it alone and reaping the benefits (and cost) of build a DVB-H network purely for itself.
This collaborative approach has worked in Italy (around Mediaset, Vodafone and Telecom Italia) and a similar approach is being tried in Finland. The same type of set up is being pursued in France and Spain, where spectrum allocation is imminent, and in the UK, if some DVB-H spectrum can be freed up.
Now the German financial regulator has seen the light and given the go ahead for the joint venture to proceed as planned, and with that amount of financial might, it seems a certainty that the venture will win the single DVB-H spectrum that is up for grabs around Germany.
The plan is not to collaborate right across the board, and within one DVB-H multiplex it has been seen in Italy (and the US) that multiple operators can offer separate bouquets of TV channels, using separate DRM systems, and that their marketing efforts can therefore be totally separate, and competition can be continued.
At present in Germany the only mobile TV service on offer comes from
Debitel, using T-DMB. So far this has failed miserably to attract customers despite being in operation for over a year. Around 7,000 customers have been reported.
This week a new venture backed company calling itself Mobile Fernsehen Deutschland (MFD) which roughly translates to the Mobile TV company, also emerged in Germany, acting as a reseller for the Debitel T-DMB delivered service which offers just five channels on an existing DAB radio multiplex, and said that it would be bidding for the DVB-H spectrum also. The company is backed by Grazia Equity, Ammax, J’ and Catharina Verwaltungs GmbH.