The director of Orange’s mobile TV effort in France stood up at a mobile TV conference last week and said he did not think that France would have a DVB-H mobile TV system before 2010. The problem is the business model he said.
This is despite that fact that the system was originally planned to go live in October 2007 on the back of the rugby world cup that was played in France. Since then there has been delay after delay. Last month another delay was announced until the first quarter of 2009, but when we spoke to Olivier Dhotel, director Mobile TV Orange Group, at the Mobile Broadcasting Forum in Amsterdam last week, he said that there was no rush and first quarter 2009 was when talks would begin again.
‘The problem is the business plan, of course it is. In France broadcasters want the MNOs to finance the majority of the network, which has to reach 30% of the French population on its first build out and 60% within 3 years. I am sure we will reach some agreement but it is very hard and the two sides are far apart right now, and Orange does not think that Mobile TV will grow any faster than the uptake of 3G ‘ it is not a hit record, it is a slow burn.’
Dhotel said discussions will go on until the end of 2009 and by the beginning of 2010 it was likely that the network would be built.
With the UK effectively unable to mount a DVB-H service prior to 2012 when spectrum may become available, and Spain holding off, and Germany’s DVB-H plans in tatters, France was the only major European country due to join the existing services in Italy and cement DVB-H as a standard in Europe. Other installations in Finland, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands have all had problems or are just out of the starting blocks, with Italy the only out and out success, but even there less than 1 million people use the services. If France does not follow until 2010, then other technologies will overtake DVB-H, such as the new idea that DVB-T is a good enough broadcast technology for phones after all.
‘Right now there under 10 devices that would be available for a DVB-H network and we want to wait until there are also some non-handset unconnected devices. Also the regulator has taken the decision about which channels are going to be placed on the DVB-H bouquet. If customers don’t like the channels the regulator has chosen then they cannot be easily dropped out of the bouquet,’ said Dhotel.
Dhotel spent the rest of the time talking up the streaming video effort that has seen more than 60 TV channels added to the Orange 3G network, but which contends with lucrative voice services on the cellular network for capacity
‘When Orange video was first launched it was a WAP portal which delivered video at 100 kbps over Edge. Today it is far better. It is encoded in H.264, it streams at 250 Kbps and runs on 3G and HSDPA. We have 800,000 active users using Orange streaming video, with 500,000 of them in France and our customers use it both as a second screen in the home and for killing time when they are bored throughout the day. And it just costs €6 to €9 ($7.5 to $11) for 20 to 60 TV channels.
We have to say that we’ve seen streaming TV and it is not comparable with broadcast DVB-H video, and even if it is close, the burden on the cellular network is significant. The notion that 250 kbps is sufficient seemed rife throughout the Forum, but in a DVB-H multiplex the average video stream starts out as a 400 kbps or 450 kbps stream, which then has a 40% gain given to it by statistical multiplexing ‘ because around 16 channels are sent at once and are multiplexed together. This means that each TV channel is compressed to around 250 kbps in the end, after the benefit of variable bit rate encoding as well as being able to borrow unused bits from other streams through multiplexing.
Dhotel may have a point that 250 kbps is at least ‘watchable’ whereas before it was not, but his predecessor told us that Orange had to launch broadcast TV by the end of 2008 or its 3G network would begin to suffer. This is obviously a moveable feast, as the upgrades through the various layers of HSDPA have taken some data pressure off streaming TV, though it is still expensive in terms of the amount of backhaul that is required.
Orange is now launching mobile triple plays with unlimited TV and internet plus a certain amount of bundled voice at prices around €32 to €38 ($40 to $48).
And Dhotel warned that business models had caused problems elsewhere.
‘In Switzerland the regulator decided to put all the risk on the MNOs and only one (Swisscom) accepted that risk. As a result it is the only operator selling DVB-H mobile TV there.’