We have to be very careful when we argue that DVB-H is not actually dead. After all we have argued on a number of occasions that it was. But what has stayed our hand from declaring the now ancient, but largely uninstalled, standard completely over and done with, are the number of trials and locations where the decision in principle has already gone the way of DVB-H. But sometimes this has turned out to be pure illusion.
At last count there was a live system in Africa, in Kenya, Nigeria, Namibia, and a Government mandated system coming in South Africa. There is a live service in Vietnam, one in Latvia, as many as four in the Philippines, a Doordashan trial running from 2006 in India, with spectrum finally going to auction this year (just like last year), while there are trials which seem to indicate that services will happen in Indonesia, in Ireland and in countries as diverse as Libya, and Malaysia.
We know that Switzerland, the Netherlands and Austria went live last year, and Poland is going live this year, but we also know that only a handful of customers have emerged. And we know that the UK has no spectrum, Germany is on its third attempt to launch a mobile TV service and France has been arguing about it since the 2007 World Rugby Cup, but doing little else except argue.
But it must knock the confidence out of the DVB-H camp when they hear how Globe from the Philippines is publicly bemoaning, after all this time, the complete lack of handsets, and saying it will not launch yet (it was supposed to go live in 2008) because devices which were promised have not arrived. This is the same story everywhere and it is a chicken and egg story.
Last week Globe chief finance officer Delfin Gonzalez said the planned DVB-H mobile TV service is dependent on the availability of handsets and talked down the other suppliers MyTV and Dream TV from smart Communications and PMSI, which are already supposed to have launched services, again back in 2006 and 2008, but which have yet to deliver any cheap or well known handset models to customers. Smart has been broadcasting since 2006, but now it turns out that this is only on a test-broadcast basis. Dream TV from PMSI is also built around DVB-H but it has the same problem. PMSI stands for Philippine Multimedia System Inc, and it has no cellular operator as a partner, and is mainly a pay TV business.
Gonzalez added to CBN News there this week that ‘We don’t know yet when we will start offering mobile TV. It largely depends on the handset manufacturers if they will come out with models at cheap prices. There are a few mobile TV handsets that are out in the market today which on average cost between P5,000 ($107) and P10,000 ($215) each.
Globe is already offering streaming celluar, but it’s network is not really good enough for this, so it is looking at providing mobile TV through an affiliated broadcaster using MMDS spectrum or satellite. MMDS spectrum has been used elsewhere, such as in South America for full SD TV services.
The only DVB-H handsets on offer in the Philippines still appear to be the Nokia N92 and N77, both significantly out of date. Late last year Nokia launched the new 5330 Mobile TV Edition at €155 ($212) supposedly aimed at these low end markets.
When you have this kind of disparity going on for such a long period of time, all over the world, you have to ask what, if anything, is going to break the log-jam.
Will it be India? Well, according to the Hindu Business Line published in India, just a few weeks ago the Government accepted recommendations from the regulator TRAI on terms which were generous to investors external to India. The spectrum to be auctioned is 8 Mhz in the 585 Mhz and 806 Mhz frequency bands.
If the government places a technology directive of using the only technology which has been trialed there, of DVB-H (which we think it will), then either the handset vendors will finally cave in and come up with a cheap DVB-H phone (probably made in India), or India will join the line of countries which have a Mobile TV system in place which is of no use to anyone.
The Indian Government will also let Doordarshan, the public service TV company which already has some existing DVB-H transmitters installed, to share its infrastructure with private players, so that might be offered cheaply, a channel at a time to other companies.
None of which convinces us that DVB-H is either awake or finally, irrevocably dead, it’s just that the longer it takes to get working handsets to all of these different parts of the world, the more chance that DVB-H for the masses will never see the light of day, leaving Mobile TV only for broadcast operations which use existing TV transmitters (ISDB-T, ATSC M/H) and offer free to air transmissions.