The DVB Project has never had as powerful an ally as Nokia pushing its technology and at last count we expect something over 40 countries, including most of Europe, will adopt DVB-H as one of its mobile TV technologies of choice, sometime in the next two years. That’s even more than the number of countries adopting DVB-T for terrestrial TV transmissions.
So when US blogs and news sources reported the Motorola move into a DVB-H mobile TV player this week, they damned it with faint praise, unsure if it would sell, or ever be seen in the US.
What Motorola’s DH01 offers is mobile TV which is NOT on a handset, a market that has been largely ignored by all but a handful of tiny consumer electronics companies. The main reason for this is because almost nobody has agreed to launch a mobile TV service unless at least ones of the local dominant cellcos was involved in taking it to market. Where a cellco is involved there is a possibility that they will veto any non-handset customers, as Verizon appears to have done with MediaFLO, in the US.
But most DVB-H consortia also have at least one member that is a broadcaster and as such wants to see as many people as possible watching mobile TV, regardless of whether or not they are an existing cellco customer. The cellco is really just a convenient repository of customer relationships as far as the broadcasting community is concerned – cellcos know where the warm bodies are that will spend money on entertainment and where they don’t, they have the advertising or DRM reach.
So it is likely that the equivalent of an ‘iPod’ will emerge, a well designed, device with an attractive proposition, and we know from the Apple experience that the first company to attack such a new market will often be the long term winner.
Rethink’s mobile TV report published last year (an update will be published at the end of this month) pointed to around 143 million non-handset devices being in the market by 2011 which can receive mobile TV.
What has emerged since that report was written is the incredible penetration rate of mobile TV services when they are offered entirely free to air, regardless of whether that is through a handset, or through a service which is transmitted from a satellite, an existing terrestrial TV network or through a new purpose built network. In Japan the ISDB-T terrestrial TV transmitters also produce a mobile TV signal in one of 13 segments, which is called the 1 seg service. There most devices are in fact mobile handsets, which pick up the 1 seg signal, but there is no need for them to be, and the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP are being retro-fitted with radios and antennas that will open them up to receive TV.
And that’s what Motorola is betting on here with the DH01, that some DVB-H services will either be entirely, or at least partially free to air, and although these will probably use Digital Rights Management (DRM) software, this can be either side loaded from a PC with an internet registration process, or it can be manufacturer installed.
In the end we would expect the US to offer a similar system to ISDB-T 1 seg, using the ATSC Mobile Handheld standard which is approaching completion (see separate story), and even the DVB technologies will support a mobile TV signal in the same spectrum as a TV signal, using DVB-T2, also on the verge of selecting its core technology in the coming weeks.
Devices which show that they are ripe for mobile TV, can be designed in a modular fashion so that they can have their radio ripped out, and another radio put in its place. So this Motorola device is significant in that it is likely to be the start of a range of devices which can attach to mobile TV from a number of networks, some of them simultaneously. For instance wi-fi will be one way of getting TV signals, plus DVB-H in many countries, which plays well for the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP, but would play equally well for devices designed for wi-fi, such as the Nokia Internet Tablet and the Sony Mylo.
As it happens Motorola has not put wi-fi on this device but we would expect a version with that added later, especially if it wants to sell it to Hong Kong’s PCCW where it has a DVB-H trial because PCCW already offers TV over wi-fi. There will also be models that work with a variety of mobile TV technologies, such as the satellite equivalent of DVB-H called DVB-SH and offered by Alcatel, Qualcomm’s MediaFLO, and ATSC M/H, once that arrives, post 2009.
It is interesting to remember that Nokia and the DTV Alliance are both trying their hardest to get the higher level software stacks inside the ATSC M/H standard to be based on the DVB stack used in both DVB-H and DVB-SH. If they achieve that, then flipping a Motorola DH01 to work with a future US ATSC network would be relatively painless.
The new Motorola device will sell out of the box in many countries and comes with a 4.3 inch QVGA Screen supporting 16 million colors, four hours of playback and a five-minute flash memory buffer to allow pause TV, like a mini DVR. It plays video at up to 25 frames a second.
It looks like Motorola will drive this product off the back of set tops and encoder sales, out of its broadcasting business, rather than solely from its handset end. If the device can be given more optional storage, and used to sideload cable TV programming, that would give it immense appeal, but this is a basic product for now. Currently storage is limited to a 256 MB secure memory card, which should store 90 minutes of TV. Prices and delivery timescales, and countries targeted were not discussed by Motorola.