It may have been picked up by all and sundry and Faultline may have been the only service NOT to come across this piece of news from February and June, but there was an allocation of Band III spectrum made in the Netherlands in February 2009 which will lead to a specially set up company, MTVNL (Mobile TV Netherlands) setting up a T-DMB network there, built around the digital audio broadcast DAB radio standard. MTVNL is a collaboration of T-Systems and Mobiles Fehrnsehen Deutschland (MFD), the companies that had a disastrous launch of mobile TV in Germany through Mobile 3.0.
And in June the company began test transmissions around the Hague, and says it will go nationwide in Summer 2010. At the time it also said that there was an agreement in principle that T-Mobile would carry phones for the service, obviously a direct attack on the DVB-H network that KPN has built and offers for €10 a month there. The company also said that talks with Vodafone and KPN were under way and that prices would undercut KPN’s.
KPN launched DVB-H services in November 2008 and launched them hard with clever advertising campaigns and an initial win of 40,000 customers. At a conference last year KPN execs said this was now unofficially 90,000. While looking for an up to date number from KPN we found that it is still quoting the 40,000 almost a year later and may have frozen the service. We know that getting cheap handsets for DVB-H has been impossible for not only Netherlands, but for all of the European DVB-H services, and this may well have swung the tide and KPN may consider offering both services, or potentially dropping its DVB-H build out.
KPN quarterly figures show TV customers have grown to 924,000 but the mobile TV numbers are buried within the 854,000 Digitenne DVB-T customer base and are not broken out and the remaining 70,000 are IPTV customers.
If KPN decides to defect from DVB-H at this delicate stage in the standard’s life, it could be fatal. Another issue is that Band III spectrum costs far less to build out than UHF or L-Band spectrum, which KPN has for DVB-H and as long as there is enough of it to offer at least 10 high quality TV channels (around 5 MHz), it genuinely might undermine DVB-H in the Netherlands. T-Mobile and Vodafone launched 3G streaming TV the moment that KPN announced its DVB-H service and would be happy to support a rival broadcast service if it dented KPN’s mobile TV lead.
MTVNL has agreements in place with Dutch Public Broadcasters, RTL and SBS and a production company IDTV. T-DMB ready devices will be imported from Korea through LG and Samsung, with at least two handsets, plus portable video players and dongles for notebooks and some in-car receivers. We doubt very much if T-DMB will really emerge from the grave in Europe, but you never know.