When we heard that the Philippines had launched its own DVB-H service this Summer we quietly noticed that it had not been one of the countries that we had expected to launch so early and nodded our appreciation at how fast some countries can move.
What we perhaps didn’t take note of as press releases came in from suppliers to the service, was that a number of the releases where from rival companies. It was not until we heard that Nagravision had landed the content protection for the Dream TV service over DVB-H that we looked hard enough to realize that there are two competing DVB-H services almost operational in the Philippines.
The latest was announced in June for a December or so launch, as Dream Mobile TV, which as Dream Satellite TV is already a brand delivered as a DTH channel by an EchoStar satellite, now available on handsets, and the other, which went live in July is the Nokia inspired system from Smart Communications.
There may yet be a third network to come from Globe Telecom making the 89 million inhabitants and almost 40 million handset owners in the Philippines among the best served mobile TV population on the planet.
Smart said it expects to get as many as 70,000 mobile TV subscribers over the next few months with its myTV which is built out in Manila and around five others cities so far, offering 10 TV services for around €8 ($11) a month on a Nokia N92 or N77 handset.
The other Dream Mobile TV is run as a brand of Philippine Multimedia System Inc (PMSI), a broadcaster and it is not quite clear whether it yet has a deal with a mobile operator for marketing the service, but it is offering Samsung handsets, and since it already uses Nagravision conditional access for its DTH service, has also just opted for that on the mobile TV version. It offers 10 channels with one of them being free.
PMSI has a deal with Associated Broadcasting Company (ABC5), which appears to be where it got its spectrum from and says it will build out to 40 major cities and launch by the end of the year.
The Nagravision system supports the Open Security Framework and Smartcard profile standards, and is also offering DVB SimulCrypt so that other conditional access systems can also be used on the service.