Listening to the presentations at the Marcus Evans Mobile TV and Video Services 2009 in Amsterdam this week, it is easy to see that broadcast Mobile TV in Europe is in tatters, with operators stalled and the constant battlecry being ‘please will someone give us some decent handsets.’
As if the cavalry were arriving, the Nokia N5330 came out at the start of the week as a token, the first cheap DVB-H handset launched in Europe at a price of €155 ($232). Previous handsets at retail have been around €450 ($600+), although the now out of date, but still top end Nokia DVB-H device is the N96, seen for sales for under €400.
We asked the KPN speaker Paul Selten, Product Manager Mobile TV there, if this constituted relief, and he said, ‘Maybe, but what we need is DVB-H on a range of popular phones, which go from top to bottom in order to make our DVB-H service take off.’
Selten had just got through telling the audience that the KPN service launched with a fanfare this time last year, which had 40,000 subscribers almost from day one, was now faltering. Selten said that the initial devices had been a single Samsung model and a single LG Electronics device, until the Nokia N96 came out.
Now with no modern device on its books KPN admits that its customers will not renew its DVB-H mobile TV service despite having built out its network to reach 89% of outdoor locations in the Netherlands and 73% of indoor. He laid the blame purely and singly at the doors of handset vendors which have not supported the standard.
What another KPN speaker told us a year ago was that mobile TV uptake was sold in two ways, either as a €9.95 monthly upgrade or by giving it free to anyone that paid over €27.50 a month on a contract. ‘We had a lot of people shift up from our average €22 a month to the €27.50 level, and the ARPU of these customers has risen by €10 a month,’ Selten confirmed, which includes the purchase of extra premium channels. Customers are using the service for between 10 and 30 minutes each time, often multiple times each day, Selten said.
Other sources at the show confirmed that handset makers were happy to make DVB-H sets, but required a minimum order of 100,000 devices. If KPN wants four or five devices to make its DVB-H service successful, then it needs to order 4 or 5 times that number.
Someone like the Broadcast Mobile Convergence Forum (BMCO) might sit between the handset makers and operators like KPN and ensure there are multiple devices at every price level distributed among multiple operators, which have DVB-H chips in, but really what the mobile TV effort in Europe requires to trigger these device volumes is one of the larger countries to begin making massive shipments.
3 Italia confirmed at the show that it was now beyond the 1 million shipment mark, but given that it was on 800,000 over a year ago, even the great shining hope for DVB-H in Europe is not growing as fast as anyone hoped.
Another presentation by NRK, the major public broadcaster in Norway was almost embarrassing in its naivety, offering as it does 6 low definition TV channels over T-DMB technology, in a 2 year trial. This work at NRK has been going on since we can remember, and Norway has used the fact that it’s not a fully paid up member of the European Union to avoid using the standard DVB-H technology for mobile TV. But speaker Bjarne Andre Myklebust, Director of Mobile Content Services at NRK, admitted that the broadcaster did not have funding enough to launch a DVB-H network, that it only had interest from the third largest Norwegian cellco and that others would not partner it and wanted to launch their own DVB-H service.
A T-DMB service would at least get over the problem of a lack of specialist broadcast mobile TV devices, because at least non-handset devices can be imported from the hugely successful T-DMB service in South Korea, which has 18 million regular viewers. However Myklebust confirmed in answer to a question, ‘We don’t use the same underlying cellular technology so there are only 2 or 3 handsets that would work with this system.’ He also confirmed that the trial would continue to run until the end of 2010 before NRK would decide whether to go ahead or not.
In contrast to all this Joachim Hoffman of Fjord, a multinational consulting group which claims to have helped the BBC in the UK pull together the iPlayer concept told us, ‘We can see that there are 6 million people using iPlayer, with 3 million of these are using it on a phone.’
iPlayer runs over wi-fi on the O2 network but on both 3 UK and Vodafone it can also run over 3G, so increasingly this type of wi-fi, 3G combination of streaming service is beginning to undermine genuine broadcast mobile TV technology, which requires extra radios and an extra production run of devices.
As for the major European countries, France still has to come up with a working compromise on who pays for building a DVB-H network, the UK has no spectrum, while the small four city German DVB-H network which was built, then shuttered, when its owner lost its license, is being discussed by T-Mobile and the German regulator. T-Mobile unleashed German league soccer onto its streaming network and crashed parts of it with the huge traffic surge, and has entered discussions to bring the DVB-H network alive once more.
The lack of numbers at the show and the generally downbeat nature of the event, along with the fact that multiple technologies are still being discussed suggests that broadcast mobile TV in Europe remains unproven, and against the renewed onslaught of streaming services, may shortly retreat into oblivion.