You can tell it’s the silly season when news services and blogs announce something that has been widely known since 2005, and treat it as news, but that’s more or less what came out of the fact that the Netherlands DVB-H mobile TV service MobielTV, which is owned by KPN, is now using Nokia N96 handsets
To a certain extent Nokia has always been the bridesmaid and never the bride as DVB-H mobile TV services have begun to get off the ground. Many early trials for DVB-H, such as this one with KPN’s Digitenne, set up in 2005, have ended up giving more business to LG and to Samsung, the two companies which tried their hardest to bury DVB-H under an avalanche of T-DMB service trials. It was Nokia you see that has run this trial since 2005.
The reason in the past was that Nokia wanted to push its own agenda with non-standard software elements such as its own 18Crypt encryption system, and got caught up in the war between OMA BCAST and DVB Open Framework. It meant that many operations such as 3 Italia, felt they could not buy Nokia devices due to their DVB-H software stack being incompatible. This was all a mistake which Nokia owned up to a full two years ago, acknowledging that it had tried Microsoft style tactics to win the bulk of the handset business for mobile TV, and as a result had ended with almost none.
Now that this is out of the way, Nokia should begin to sell neck and neck with the LG and Samsung devices in all new DVB-H based mobile TV markets, and the N96 is likely to sell at least as well as anything that LG and Samsung have to offer in this sector.
Nevertheless when the Netherlands service went live a few months back, there was still no Nokia device included, despite the fact that the underlying technology ‘ encoders, IP encapsulator, management software and DRM ‘ including the Nokia Mobile Broadcast Solution and a broad range of services like consulting, platform integration, project management, support services and turnkey implementation – all came from Nokia Siemens networks, a deal that it only felt that it could announce this week. The transmitters were supplied by to Nokia Siemens by Harris and the encoders by Envivio.
The service provider here is Digitenne a consortia of KPN, NOB, a Dutch broadcasting facilitator and Nozema, a Dutch TV transmission operator which is offering both DVB-T and DVB-H services. Ten television channels and 2 audio channels have been on trial using Nokia equipment since 2005, and these went fully live across 85% of the country in June. The coverage in the Netherlands is 85% if you’re outside and a 65% indoors.
The channels available for now are Nederland 1, Nederland 3, RTL4, RTL24, SBS6, Jetix/Veronica, MTV Music, Discovery Channel, Xite and Nick Toonsand more channels are expected to be included in the offering in the future.
The only countries that have gone live inside Europe with DVB-H now are Italy, Finland, Switzerland, Austria and to some extent Germany, but that service is now in some considerable doubt, as the main operator has had its funding pulled. France originally planned to be in operation by October 2007 in time for the rugby world cup there, but still hasn’t launched. It will have problems making it inside 2008 now.
All this despite the European Commission picking DVB-H as the lead EU standard for mobile TV,
Nokia Siemens Networks is also leading trials and services in DVB-H in Finland, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and its only other deal in Europe was made in Switzerland.
The KPN Digitenne system costs €10 a month and has been introduced as a free offer for the time being and uses OMA BCAST DRM