We have no idea of what kind of hoops Swiss conditional access company Nagravision had to jump through to win the rights to the Chinese mobile TV DRM, but the scale of the roll out is just beginning to hit home.
Nagravision has now said that its deal with China Satellite Mobile Broadcasting is about to enter phase two of deployment and re-iterates what has been repeated a number of times, that the Mobile TV systems has been deployed in 150 cities in China already and that in phase two an additional 188 cities will be targeted.
Non-believers within the Mobile TV community at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a few weeks back cast doubt on those claims and said that only enough equipment for 40 Cities had been shipped and the rest were not yet live or would they be for some time. It’s hard to know who to believe when the installations are out in the wilds of China, but we think that Nagravision should know if there are encryption servers in place.
The company revealed that it has granted licenses to install its DRM client with 120 companies and that between them they will launch 200 devices. Nagravision says it is on schedule to complete integration with more than 150 devices by the first quarter of 2009. Nagravision is integrating conditional access into devices such as mobile phones, pocket TVs and PC dongles.
SARFT (the state administration of radio, film and television) insists that every CMMB device has DRM installed although the current Mobile TV bouquets are free to air, but still encrypted. These are encrypted because after about one year of operation (this Summer) a number of the channels will change to being paid for. Nagravision has already delivered 500,000 secure chips to date.
SARFT has claimed that China will ship 12 million mobile TV devices this year, and Nagravision partially backs this up, saying it has firm plans for shipping over four million secure chips in 2009. Presumably other chip makers are making their own security elements otherwise the numbers don’t quite add up.
Our estimate for mobile TV device shipments in China in 2009 is five million, because we think that SARFT is a little ‘enthusiastic’ with its predictions, although Nagravision may only be talking about a first round of chip shipments and, as we said, there may be local chip suppliers.
“The successful deployment of a nationwide mobile TV service continues and we expect to have 10 million subscribers in 2009 and upwards of 50 million subscribers in 2010,” said a Senior Executives of China Satellite Mobile Broadcasting.