The two main chip suppliers for mobile TV, Siano and DiBcom, both have new offerings out, timed to coincidentally attract attention at the IBC show in Amsterdam next week.
Siano has landed a deal with US headquartered PC distributor Hauppauge Digital for the SMS1150 chip in a new miniature digital TV USB receiver called WinTV MiniStick. The device is targeted at Europe and South Asia where they are using DVB-T broadcast networks but it can also support T-DMB in Korea and ISDB-T in Japan and Brazil. The WinTV MiniStick will support both Windows and Linux computers.
Siano says that the annual mobile PC market is expected to grow from 132 million units this year to 260 million units in 2012, citing In-Stat figures and Siano says that the WinTV MiniStick has sufficient sensitivity for indoor use and lower battery consumption making it ideal for use with ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs).
Meanwhile in a very similar announcement French DVB-T/DVB-H specialist DiBcom says that it now has two new products, the DIB9090 and DIB8090 which both support very low power mobile TV reception of DVB-T and ISDB-T 13 seg signals. These chips can also support the mobile equivalents of DVB-H and ISDB-T 1seg.
DiBcom had a two year lead in DVB-H chips but originally said that it saw no need for multi-protocol chips, where it ceded the lead to Israeli Siano, and it is now following suit.
In Japan, where 1seg ISDB-T has been deployed on mobile phones, more than 30 Million units have already been sold and handset manufacturers are also starting to look at implementing reception of Full-seg ISDB-T. This will enable them to offer high definition TV on large screen mobile phones, says DiBcom. We’re not sure we believe a handset chip could decode the full TV signal efficiently enough, without huge battery drain and with in-building penetration, but DiBcom says so.
DVB-T and Full-seg ISDB-T use high level modulation schemes to transmit high bit-rate TV signals, which makes them too difficult to receive in mobile conditions as much due to Doppler effects as any other reason. DiBcom released the first mobile TV DVB-T receivers for the automotive industry back in 2002. Yet it took another six years to reduce power consumption, size, and the number of discrete components to significantly low levels without compromising performance, the company says. It would be interesting to look at the quality of image indoors between the DTT an Mobile TV equivalents.
‘We are very pleased to see handsets implementing both DVB-T and DVB-H on the same platforms’, says Yannick Levy, CEO of DiBcom. ‘DVB-T based Free-To-Air TV signals are broadcast in many countries today, thus making it very attractive for consumers to try out TV reception on handhelds. Once users are hooked, they will demand more content and better coverage. In this way, they are more likely to subscribe to DVB-H services and watch more content on 3G. Handset manufacturers now see a real opportunity to create higher volumes compared to the levels that DVB-H only devices can achieve. This new feature is therefore a very attractive one to differentiate their products.’
What we think Levy really means is that the poor indoor reception on DVB-T and ISDB-T 13 seg, on a mobile device, and the constant battery drain might hook people on mobile TV and then they will pay for a purpose built receiver chip in the device, because in DVB networks especially, the high modulation schemes are only possible targeting outdoor stationery antennas, so it is the network and the transmission power that stop the reception being good on a handset, as much as chip simplicity and sensitivity.
DiBcom will be enjoying the hype surrounding DVB-T in Germany where local operators angry at being pushed out of running the DVB-H services there, have flooded the market with DVB-T handsets. If they really worked well, they would have infiltrated the rest of Europe, but that hasn’t happened.