Although Mobile TV appears to be in the doldrums in the West, in the Far East, and especially in Japan, it is going gangbusters, with over 40 million subscribers today, likely to rise by another 20 million devices in the coming year. Now the iPhone has been added to the number, in a deal which lets market leading Mobile TV chip maker Siano Mobile Silicon, into the Japanese market.
No Siano hasn’t got a deal with Apple, instead it is directly with Softbank, the company which bought the old Vodafone Japan business a few years back, for a plug in device, powered by a Siano chip, which can pick up ISDB-T 1 seg Mobile TV broadcasts.
It works with the iPhone 3G and comes with its own battery and will be first demonstrated at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Just last week, previous market leader DiBcom made a bid to get back to the front of the mobile TV chip market when it announced the mother of all multi-protocol mobile TV chips ‘ supporting every mobile TV type you can imagine, in a move to take a big chunk of the laptop and netbook market on mobile TV. DiBcom said its platform enables one design to be aimed at CMMB, DVB-T, DVB-H, DVB-SH, ISDB-T (1SEG & Full-SEG) and T-DMB. Other emerging standards such as ATSC M/H, DVB-T2, and any others will follow.
DiBcom was once dominant in DVB-H chips and 2 years ahead of the market and remains strong in the lower power DVB-T market. It says that the devices targeted by what it calls its Octopus chip include the automotive market, PC’s and notebooks, PMP, PNDs (personal navigation devices), mobile phones as well as LCD TV and set tops market.
But while that may have taken the wind out of a lot of sails, rival Siano had released an ISDB-T chip a year ago, when the Israeli mobile TV chipmaker came out with its second generation multi-protocol chip, adding ISDB-T signals used in Japan and recently also taken up by Brazil.
The first Siano chip, the SMS1000 had taken the company into DVB-H, DVB-T, DAB, DAB-IP and T-DMB, but Siano was missing out on the thriving Japanese market. So it launched the SMS1100, a new cut of the Siano chip able to tune and decode ISDB-T signals, as well as all the other formats.
Since then Siano’s commitment to China has given it the lead spot in the CMMB mobile TV market in China, which we expect to ship at least 5 million devices this year and then racked up big design wins at Dell, ZTE, Tianyu and CEC Telecom as well its exiting deal with Aigo for its MP3 players there.
But this is the first public design win for the ISDB-T version of the chip and even the mighty Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, which both each came out with ISDB-T capability a while ago, have yet to register their first wins in Japan. And if the iPhone device works out for it there, it will no doubt lead to other chip wins in the world’s biggest mobile TV market, currently dominated by local suppliers.
The new Siano powered accessory streams TV to the iPhone using Wi-Fi and the device can also act as a redundant power supply for the iPhone, practically functioning as a charger-on-the-go. Siano only opened Japanese offices in July.
Alon Ironi, CEO of Siano, commented: ‘To be selected for the iPhone TV and Battery accessory is testament to the high performance of our MDTV receiver chips. We look forward to providing Japan’s multimedia-savvy end-users with a superior mobile TV experience ‘ high quality TV reception both indoors and on-the-go.’
The recent Siano 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.