US analog mobile TV chip maker Telegent Systems announced two phones deals this week, which it says shows that top end tier 1 smartphone makers are just as interested as the smaller cheap white label phone makers, to put analog TV on phones.
The deals were done with the second largest phone maker in the world, Samsung and US owned, contract manufacturer Brightstar which has come up with a World Cup Soccer phone which is mostly for Africa and Latin America, for just $35. Let’s face it, at that price you wouldn’t even care if it didn’t work as a phone, just as a TV.
Samsung launched its Star TV S5233T which it will sell in Southeast Asia and it’s a version of the Tocco Lite with a Telegent chip added, just short of being a smart phone, and usually priced at around $170 or so without the TV chip. What it is, even if it’s not an OS driven smartphone, is a highly desirable touch phone with a TouchWiz screen engine.
Samsung has added the ability to flick the screen to change channels, and added one-click screen capture and record, on-screen keypad channel entry and reception of incoming SMS messages while the phone continues to show TV.
‘Samsung has raised the bar for the mobile TV viewing experience with the Star TV’s combination of high RF sensitivity and innovative TV feature implementation,’ said Sam Sheng, president and CEO of Telegent. ‘Samsung has delivered superior ease of use in a small, thin touchscreen TV design that stands out in the marketplace.’
Telegent reckons more than 88% of the world’s population will still be able to receive analog broadcast TV signals during 2013.
Its second new partner Brightstar has launched the “Football TV” Phone called the Avvio 505. Initially this was launched at Mobile World Congress, but pricing at an impressive $35 has just been released.
“With the Avvio 505, we are delivering a model designed to appeal to sports fans in the Latin American and African markets,” said Jaime Narea, vice-president of Brightstar’s Idea to Consumer Division. “In these markets, consumers have a passion for football, and all eyes will be on the events unfolding real time this summer in South Africa. The combination of voice and TV in a low-cost handset is very compelling for consumers who want to follow the matches live, whether they are at work, home, or on the road.”
The Avvio 505 offers voice, SMS, TV and FM radio all on a tiny 2 inch screen. There are no figure on how long it will show TV for on a single charge but it is likely to be for less than a soccer match we reckon, so best watch the second half only, or plug it in. Brightstar says the Avvio 505 will be sold in select operator and retail channels throughout Latin America and Africa prior to the World Cup.
Back in November Telegent said that it was preparing a US IPO to raise $250 million and that digital rival Maxlinear was going to try to do the same, despite surviving on far lower revenues.
Telegent has successfully challenged the established order in mobile TV, and has shipped 50 million analog TV chips so far. Its big problems in carrying out an IPO is that most of its revenues comes from China, from a handful of distributors, and much the same is true of MaxLinear, but in Japan.
Telegent is still expecting a $250 million IPO, but in March MaxLinear produced a lower estimate for its own IPO, aiming to raise between $43 million and $50 million, rather than the $100 million it had first estimated.
Telegent is four years old and came out of stealth two years ago with its first of two generations of chip sets, which can receive and demodulate any type of global analog TV signal – NTSC, PAL or SECAM. Since then it has shipped over 50 million chips, way more than any single chip supplier in digital broadcast TV, and only in Japan has any single country shipped more devices than that (around 70 million ISDB-T 1 seg devices by year end, but this is across a handful of suppliers, of which MaxLinear is the leader).