Israeli mobile TV chip company Siano Mobile Silicon has reeled off in the past week more success than any other chip company in this sector has managed in the past five years, signing up Dell globally and ZTE and others in China, giving it the Lion’s share of the exploding Chinese mobile TV market overnight.
After years of patiently pursuing all the disparate mobile TV broadcast technologies including DVB-H, ISDB-T, MediaFLO, T-DMB and DVB-T Siano has landed two massive accounts just as the mobile TV chip market is expected to take off. The key to both of these deals was to make China a priority and target the CMMB STiMi market for the locally designed standard which uses a hybrid satellite ‘ terrestrial technology.
The only name which Siano had previously been public about was the Aigo MP3 player design win in China, whereas clearly the market leader in handsets was likely to be ZTE and handsets are likely to make up the majority of Chinese mobile TV devices.
This week Siano said it had contracts with ZTE, Tianyu, CEC Telecom as well as the Aigo branded MP3 player, competing with local rivals Innofidei and Telepath, both of which have produced designs which are larger, use more power and are tougher to design into handsets. If Siano gets the bulk of the handset designs from these manufacturers will be become completely dominant.
The Chinese market is yet to be inundated by the major US, Japanese and European chip vendors such as Broadcom, Qualcomm and NXP. We already know Japan’s Sharp plans to enter the Chinese market shortly, while Siano rival DiBcom has claimed a partnership with local supplier Lenovo but only advises on chip design, and has no Chinese design of its own. DiBCom has been largely considered the leader in DVB-T and DVB-H chips for the past four years, at one stage having an 18 month lead on everyone in those markets.
Alon Ironi, CEO of Siano, commented: ‘We are witnessing more and more leading Chinese brands deciding to use Siano’s CMMB receiver in their new models. We estimate that CMMB will ultimately become the most popular mobile TV technology worldwide and look forward to witnessing huge market ramp-up in China in 2009.’ A recent decision by Middle East supplier S2M to use the CMMB technology to offer mobile TV in North Africa and the Middle East means that Siano will have a head start in supplying that market also. There is also strong lobbying by Chinese manufacturers to get CMMB used in India alongside DVB-H, and if that attempt is successful, it will open up another huge market for Siano.
While ZTE is thought to have taken the lion’s share of local CMMB devices, Tianyu with its K-Touch brand is also said to be chasing hard. SARFT (State Administration for Radio, Film and Television) in China, which is responsible for designing the standard, says that it expects 10 million CMMB deices sold in 2009 and around 50 million during 2010. While we think these are likely to be optimistic exaggerations more modest predictions would still put Siano in the driving seat to ship something close to 6 million chips this year and 15 million the year after, and that’s just in China.
Our first thought is that one of the European or US chip majors might make a move to acquire Siano in the next few months, but Siano is unlikely to worry about funding going forwards and could just as easily exit to Chinese interests.
Meanwhile the Dell deal relies on the fact that Siano has always tried to support as many mobile TV protocols on its chips as it could, and Dell wants to make its Inspiron laptops as standard as possible across as many countries as possible, taking in Europe in the first instance this quarter (DVB-T), followed by North America (ATSC M/H and MediaFLO) and Asia-Pacific (ISDB-T and T-DMB) and China (CMMB) later in the year.
Dell says it will offer region-specific versions, designed to receive local broadcast TV standards (rather than mobile TV only), supplied as a USB dongle. Prices will start at around $50 and the digital TV tuners will receive live and free to air local and HD TV broadcasts where available. If Siano is supplying all of the chips for Dell (it only says that the tuner was made with its help) that means it is all ready with an ATSC M/H version of its chip.
The USB tuner will ship with Dell’s version of Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP or Windows Vista Basic. The device is similar in size to a USB key and includes a built in telescoping antenna which retracts into the casing.
The CMMB standard, based on the Chinese homegrown technology known as STiMi (short for Satellite and Terrestrial Interactive Multiservice Infrastructure) is currently deployed in over 100 cities in China including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou with nationwide coverage, supported by the addition of satellite broadcast, planned for 2009.
Siano offers two chipset, the SMS1185 which supports antenna diversity on a single chip for both the terrestrial UHF signal and the satellite S-band signal and the SMS1180 which supports only one antenna for each spectrum band. Both come bundled with software drivers for Windows XP, Vista, Linux, and Windows Mobile.