Necessity is the mother of invention, and in the same way that western society will only ever develop a replacement for oil when it actually runs out, cellular operators will only invent and embrace a new broadcast mobile TV system when their 3G capacity begins to run out. Well it’s running out and we always knew it would, and particularly nervous are those operators ‘ Vodafone and Orange ‘ which have habitually led on 3GPP unicast streaming TV channels, both offering 60 or more TV channels on their various cellular networks.
When you clog up a cellular network in that way, with heavy video traffic, you begin to see just how valuable an alternative method for delivering it can be. Like in $billions of deferred LTE build out.
Which is perhaps why the first worthwhile trial for MBMS anywhere in the world was carried out in downtown Bristol a few years ago by a collective of UK cellular operators, and why that collective had continued to a second trial, which was supposed to take in 2,000 West London cellular users, which should have been live even today and why this week O2, Orange, and Vodafone are now jointly launching a pilot using IMB (Integrated Multimedia Broadcast) technology.
IMB is an updated standard for multicasting on cellular TDD signals, which was previously addressed by the failed MBMS standard.
There have been so many false dawns for mobile TV, here in Europe and around the rest of the world, that people talk about it as if it was a failed idea. Where a viable free to air system, which has good content, has been launched, it has been a huge success for consumers (Japan and Korea) even if it has never made tons of money for anyone in the eco-system.
But even today streaming TV services, sent over cellular signals, despite offering fairly decent images, are being held back by cellular operators, afraid that they will saturate their networks with people using phones as portable TV viewers.
Quite simply, we need broadcast services, not Unicast – services which borrow little or nothing from the conventional two way cellular voice bandwidth, in order to economically watch TV or any kind of live video, on our phones.
So when last September the IMB standard was embraced by the GSMA, promising not only that it would deliver broadcast programming over TDD spectrum, already designated within 3G licenses as ‘one way’ data delivery spectrum, but also saying loud and clear that all the kinks had been knocked out of the system and that this time the TDD signals reception would never interfere with existing cellular FDD signals, it looked like the conventional cellular community had found its answer.
But sadly there has been little but silence from cellular operators since then on the subject, during a time when DVB-H broadcast and Qualcomm’s FLO services and other paid for broadcast Mobile TV system, have continued to fall into disrepair. Qualcomm is now spending a second fortune both trying to promote FLO TV, as well as buying in new content for it, but so far without discernable success.
Now a trial will finally launch in the UK. It will use the combined TDD spectrum (5 MHz each) of O2, Vodafone, Orange and of course the UK part of T-Mobile which Orange merged with. This trial could potentially use some 20 MHz of one way spectrum, which by our calculations could deliver between 60 and 80 broadcast TV channels, making it the most comprehensive mobile TV system in the world.
IP Wireless, the UK company that has long sought ways in which TDD spectrum can be used, will provide the TDD transmitters for the trial, Ericsson will put the whole thing together as an integrator and French streaming specialist Streamezzo will manage the handset UI.
Two years ago there was supposed to be a trial using the 10 MHz of contiguous TDD spectrum that Orange and T-Mobile have in their UK 3G licenses, before they merged. We were told at the time that each 5MHz segment could support 15 TV channels and that estimate has now been raised to 20 since the emergence of the IMB standard. Ericsson had fought tooth and claw to prevent the TDtv product of IP Wireless being widely taken up because it conflicted with how Ericsson saw the use of TDD, but IMB was a compromise worked out between Ericsson and how it saw the future, and IP Wireless, which was driving the older trials. Once the new IMB standard was worked out, work stopped on the London trial.
The cost issues are fairly simple ‘ a $10,000 transmitter needs to be added to one in every three base stations, and chips which pick up TDD signals, which also offer signal diversity (picking up multiple signals to boost the signal strength) need to be added to handsets. IP Wireless had been doing this in the form of a single $20 chipset, and it was this price which has proved the major obstacle to the implementation of such a technology ‘ handset vendors will always refuse to offer devices which include some non-standard silicon, unless the order volume is significant.
What we were told last September was that the logic to pick up TDD signals, resolve and tune them, including boosting the signal by using antenna diversity, can all be put into existing WCDMA/HSDPA chipsets and perhaps this is the reason that there has been a quiet period of 9 months for IMB, we were all waiting for a new generation of 3G chips. When we asked IP Wireless this, it said simply that ‘Handsets will initially require a separate IMB chipset, but we expect handsets featuring a single integrated chipset to be commercially available in the future,’ which we take to mean that this grouping has yet to convince even the tame ST Ericsson, which is part owned by Ericsson, that this step is worthwhile.
But like everything else in Mobile TV, each step always takes a lot longer than you think, and this trial, if successful, could lead to a proposition down the road, towards the end of 2011, whereby mobile TV can be introduced fairly cheaply, country by country. This will be especially true where that country has no ideal UHF 700 MHz spare spectrum (such as the UK) and where the operators are committed to mobile streaming TV, and of course in countries like France where the cellular operators and the broadcasters simply cannot agree on a business model or a way forward.
The essential element of IMB is the offload potential for unicast services. They can be deployed in a number of ways. They could purely be demand driven, where a second person choosing to view a TV channel from a particular base station, instead of triggering a second, expensive streame carried over cellular, can share the existing send with the first viewer. His handset is simply told within the TDD spectrum, where to find it. This has a huge effect on the network. When, for instance, the world cup soccer is on, 3,000 people might watch a game within range of a single base station, and it would take up less spectrum than if one person had streamed it over the FDD signal within cellular.
This can either all happen dynamically, or ALL TV can be shipped to a core set of TDD signals from multiple suppliers, and ONLY VoD video is sent over unicast, dramatically removing pressure on 3G networks for delivering voice signals. A single Unicast video signal can take as much as 250 Kbps, which is spectrum on which close to 20 people could be speaking.
Consumers don’t even have to know that this technology is included in their handsets, but in order to get the benefits from such as scenario, a lot of different top end video capable handset models need to be upgraded to include these chipsets. Otherwise these are instead, still weighing down the network with video requests. If you can’t get this technology into the most popular handsets, then it fails.
This is why it is essential that chip vendors get on board with this kind of additional chip function because otherwise consumers have to be pushed onto less popular handsets. Imagine an operator saying ‘You can get TV’ but not on an iPhone, you have to have one of these cheaper, less functional phones.’ It just wouldn’t fly.
Of course the iPhone can be included in any TV scenario by using a TDD to Wi-Fi converter and calling it a dongle, and such devices are also sure to be tried once this initial trial gets off the ground.
We know that broadcasters would flock to this kind of solution for opening up their advertising markets to portable devices, but they would want such a move brought to market free to air. That’s not the way this is being sold to cellular operators, who instead see this as an offload from their network of TV 3GPP streaming function which is already eating bandwidth. These services are typically paid for, but artificially kept at low numbers, usually under the 1 million devices per network, due to their ability to eat into voice traffic. We know that at Orange in France, the operator deliberately squashes video signals to give preference to voice, which gives the impression to users that the video technology is flaky. Take that impression away and these service may well double and treble in size overnight.
The new UK multi-operator pilot, will run for three months starting in October in central London and Slough, and won’t restrict itself purely to video. It will look at how any mobile broadcast services can be deployed using shared network infrastructure ‘ think streamed music channels too. The sharing issue between three networks is that the system as designed creates a single frequency network, so each base station can transmit at higher power without fear of interfering with other signals. That means that only one in three base stations need to have the extra transmitter. And if you have three operators, they can cut that to one each, in every nine of their own base stations. That kind of cost cut can keep the deployment way under the cost per channel delivered, of say DVB-H. It could be as little as 25% of the cost, on a shared operator basis.
To do this they would have to share out the TV channel capacity or offer the same bouquets. But there are many ways of slicing and dicing this and going back to discussions we had two years ago with IP Wireless, here’s what we think is likely. There might be a common, free to air, 20 channel service that all the operators can sell. The cost would be hidden in a slight increase in an overall handset contract, a few dollars a month.
Then there might be operator branded channels, let’s say 10 or 15 more channels each, this provides the differentiation based on past content deals each carrier has used for unicast streaming. Then a further set of branded paid broadcaster channels like Sky Sports, might be offered, with Sky getting most of the money and the operator who sells it, getting most of the rest. A cut might be shared out among all the operators, to ensure that the infrastructure is paid for among all of them.
Finally extra advertising outside of the TV channels themselves, pre-rolls while the software loads or edge of screen drop menu style advertising, might be sold directly by the operators. Streamezzo even has a way of sending new adverts via SMS to handsets, which then run as overlays over video, and that might come into play.
IP Wireless and Ericsson point out that TDD spectrum is already part of the 3G licenses held by many European mobile operators, and is available to over 150 operators across 60 countries covering more than half a billion subscribers. So if one country gets this right, there is plenty of scope for co-operating handset vendors to make good.
‘We believe the road is clear for IMB now that it has been endorsed by the GSMA and supported by the wider mobile ecosystem,’ said Gavin Franks, Head of New Business Development at O2. ‘Based on the results of the pilot, we anticipate being able to offer our consumers through our networks a range of innovative new broadcast services such as mobile TV and intelligent broadcasting that will lead to an enhanced user experience.’
If this works, then expect Ericsson to quietly pick off IP Wireless in a bloodless acquisition in order to keep all the intellectual property involved here, to itself. But as we say in Mobile TV, a lot can go wrong before this is the ‘de facto’ way to offer mobile TV so let’s wait and see.