While everyone involved in mobile TV technology around the world has sat on the sidelines confused over what will be the final technology choice of the Chinese government, Israeli chip start-up Siano Mobile Silicon is almost ready with a CMMB STiMi chip, using the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) favored technology.
Internal factions within China are still thought to be battling it out for supremacy, but the technical trials in place now are ready to expand to reach 40 Chinese cities by April next year in a pilot of the scheme that will likely make China the leading mobile TV country in a few short years. These pilots will not begin with a satellite delivered signal after all, but with the satellite’s terrestrial support network, with the satellite due to kick in later in 2008.
Due to the politics surrounding mobile TV there, and just which government agency has control, China will bring mobile TV to market ahead of the June 2008 Olympics, but without any involvement from the major cellular operators, China Mobile and China Unicom. Instead stand alone devices will be on the market starting at $25 for a laptop card, rising to $150 for a digital pocket TV, and thereafter to pocket PCs in the $300 to $400 range, entirely as a retail Consumer Electronics proposition. This makes it the first country in the world to try that, a move which the USA is running shy of daring.
The two mobile giants may join in later, or offer their own multicast technologies, or work with Samsung on its fledgling T-DMB network, or even support all of these moves. That all depends on government edict and just who wins out in the internal political battles.
The initial devices will have to be built supporting both the 2.6 GHz satellite signal which will cut in during late 2008, as well as three 8 MHz channels in 700 MHz, which are being built up around China’s biggest 40 cities now.
Alon Ironi of Siano told Faultline, ‘The trials now are just with a few thousand people, and this will move to pilot deployments in April. The system will offer 9 free to air channels, which will also carry advertising, for one year, until April 2009. The satellite will be launched in April as well, but will not begin offering service until much later in the year.
‘There will be 5 TV channels from China Cable TV and four further domestic regional channels, all free. By 2009 this will shift to 25 pay TV channels and 5 free to air channels. That’s what’s planned eventually,’ he said.
The deal that Siano announced this week was a complex one where it will deliver a new variant of its SMS1010 multi-protocol chip which will have radios for both frequencies, and also offer it own SMS8021 on chip UHF antenna, all ready to work with the new technology by April.
‘The deal has two or three elements really,’ said Ironi, ‘We will work with the CMB Satellite company that is owned by EchoStar that is providing the satellite capacity and management, and with Chinese company Huaqi, which offers the ‘aigo’ brand of MP3 players in China. Eventually that relationship will be a chip supplier deal, but right now we are helping them define the user interface, and the EPG look and feel, ahead of the new chip being available.’
The aigo brand of MP3 players has around 35% market share in China, Siano claims, and it should be among the first to market with a mobile TV player. Other chip players that are leading in the market are entirely local Chinese manufacturers and as far as we know, none of the chip heavyweights such as Texas Instruments or Qualcomm have addressed the Chinese STiMi mobile TV system, although they may have done so in secret, as may have Philips or DVB-H chip leader DiBcom.
‘We began working on the STiMi system, and the more we dealt with the Chinese, the more our confidence grew that this was the right system to be delivering and we accelerated our R&D. We continue to work on a MediaFLO version of our chip, but we haven’t seen the same reasons for accelerating that R&D, as we have for STiMi,’ said Ironi. Ironi was referring to the rumored sluggish sales that Verizon has experienced on its VCast TV version of MediaFLO in the US.
There is yet to be a clear picture of whether or not the STiMi technology will have a royalty to pay, although the Chinese attitude appears to be that the whole point of inventing their own technology is to make a very low license fee for this type of technology, at least on home soil.
The other key partner for the STiMi system in China is likely to be which conditional access (DRM) system it will use. All of the major players in TV conditional access are pushing hard to win this, with satellite delivery company EchoStar clearly very keen on Nagravision, since that’s what it uses in the US, where they have a 50:50 joint venture. But Irdeto and NDS both have submissions to SARFT, and there are local encryption and DRM systems also being proposed coming out of Chinese universities. The decision won’t have to be made on that for over a year however, because the initial channels will be in the clear, and free to air.
‘Initially we expect this market to take off slowly, with perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 devices shipped during 2008, just to ensure that China shows what it can do at the Olympics. But during 2009 we expect this to increase tenfold to around 2.5 million, and go to over 10 million units in 2010,’ said Ironi.
The other part of the Chinese digital TV technologies is a very different 700 MHz system for standard definition TV signals, more analogous to DVB-T, called DMB T/H. This is not likely to be launched until 2009, and China has a provisional analog TV cut off date of 2015. This makes China the first country not only to launch mobile TV without any cellular partners, but also one of the only countries to launch mobile TV ahead of a digital terrestrial offering.