It was always going to be a matter of time before either Telecom Italia or Vodafone finally used the DVB-H network that Mediaset has built for them in Italy, to fight back at the upstart 3 Italia which has mustered some 700,000 DVB-H mobile TV customers and it has this week, commissioning a 3G laptop card from Siano, Onda and CyberLink which doubles as a HSDPA card.
No-one else seems to have thought of it before, add a data card that also decodes TV, as a laptop retail sale, and given we bumped into Siano at Telco TV this week it seemed worthwhile asking about it.
‘We did the DVB-H part of the design and got some help from ZTE for the HSDPA,’ confessed Dror Meiri, head of business development for Siano, chatting to Faultline after a panel we both attended on mobile TV at the show.
‘Onda Communications in Italy put the device together and CyberLink added the software stack,’ said Meiri.
Telecom Italia executives unveiled the card, called the DT501HS, at their quarterly conference in Berlin, this week and sales will start in TIM’s stores in Italy next month.
The product interfacing via USB 2.0 includes a SIM card of the operator and a secured conditional access system from NagraVision.
‘We regard this product as being a clear natural extension to our existing DVB-H and HSDPA mobile products’, said Onda President Michelanglo Agrusti. ‘Italy was the first European country to commercially deploy DVB-H, and the coverage here is nation-wide. This new product now allows consumers to use their PC’s and notebooks as the centre of their multimedia and data communication applications, and enjoy both TV and interactive services at the same time. On a notebook, the end user can not only receive the content, but also store it, edit, forward, etc., which basically means getting a broader value from the DVB-H subscription fee.’
Unlike other DVB-H products in the market, the slim DT501HS does not have an external antenna instead using Siano’s antenna chip, co-developed with Vishay, mounted on the internal circuit board.