There is little significance of Norway refusing to bow to European Commission pressure and choosing to use T-DMB technology for its mobile TV service rather than the so called European standard DVB-H. Norway has finally, after around 4 years of trials, launched it, as a pilot for now, and potentially a permanent service if it does well. It was launched last week, will be called MiniTV and will include 6 TV channels – NRK1, NRK2, NRK3, TV 2, TV 2 News 24 and Viasat TV 3 plus 15 DAB digital radio channels.
To be clear Norway is not exactly part of the European Union – but it has privileged trading rights because it is part of another grouping called the European Free Trade Association – basically that’s a special trading status for European countries which have had referendums where the population says they want to stay outside of the EU, but are effectively inside it.
That is except for having to obey European directives, which is why Norway’s copyright law trailed so badly during the period when the Motion Picture Association of America wanted so sue a 14 year old Norwegian boy (DVD Jon) for breaking the CSS DVD scrambling system. It can also ignore with impunity the technology standards directives which come out of the European Commission. But that’s not the reason that it is not significant.
Norway has only 4.6 million people and well over 100% mobile handset penetration, but given that the new service ‘ only launched in the Greater Oslo area, covers just 30% of that population (so around 1.4 million people) and the fact that as far as we can see there are no mobile handsets actually launched yet, and that the broadcasters are relying purely on tiny specialist TV sets, then we would expect it to take 3 – 5 years for the penetration of that region to be 50%, around 700,000 devices. But even this pedestrian rate is not the reason that this is not significant, because it would still have the power to influence other nearby countries if the execution was good and lots of devices came available.
What probably makes it less significant is that we would honestly expect the implementation to be fairly weak, even though we have not seen it. It has been put together by broadcasters which have not given out technical details, but all the other attempts at T-DMB technology relied on taking existing DAB multiplexes which are organized into 1.5 MHz of available spectrum each, and laying a combination of TV and audio on it. That is with the exception of South Korea, where a number of contiguous slices of spectrum (4 we think) were put together to make a solid 6 MHz to 7MHz based service.
We cannot find the spectrum details for this launch except that it looks like a traditional DAB multiplex in Band III (which is perfect spectrum for rugged and island terrain), but we expect that like in Germany and the UK, where existing multiplexes were used, it will offer too few channels, at too low a quality and resolution for the service to take off to the extent that the rest of Europe is jealous. That doesn’t meant that it won’t be considered a success internally ‘ but there will be no device roaming on TV with any other European country (but language problems probably halt that anyway).
Modern Times Group which runs Viasat is saying that it plans to introduce pay TV channels additionally at some point, but that will depend upon capacity and the success of the uptake. On handsets the broadcasters are talking about offering VoD services as well, but that means introducing streaming cellular services. Other services that will be launched include a real time traffic update service, like the one that made T-DMB take off in Seoul in South Korea.
Norway is known to have conducted early trials in interactive usage and advertising and will no doubt be trying to tie in its new Mobile TV service with 3G interactivity ‘ now those results may well be very interesting ‘ irrespective of the underlying broadcast technology used.