Leading mobile TV chip supplier Israel’s Siano Mobile Silicon said this week it will launch a software protocol stack for China Mobile’s Mobile Broadcasting Business Management System ‘ MBBMS, the system specified by China Mobile which handles billing, user management and conditional access for the CMMB mobile TV service.
The idea is that all the users of Siano’s chips can use this version for free, so they don’t have to develop their own, slightly different software stack for TD-SCDMA phones, to work with the dominant China Mobile mobile TV system.
Some handset vendors in the past have built their own MBBMS or had to pay to license it from local software suppliers.
CMMB is the broadcast mobile TV standard in China covering around 330 cities, reaching most of the urban population of the country. The service comes from China’s Broadcast Corporation (CBC) and China Mobile offers its own version of DRM and is the dominant supplier of this technology. Already China is saying it has 10 million CMMB users and the system has now been sold to Tajikistan for later deployment.
Siano supplies BYD, Compal, Dell, Garmin, Mitac, Huawei, Motorola, OnTim, Samsung, Yulong, ZTE with chips to tune and decode the signal.
The Siano version of MBBMS will run on Linux, Android and Windows Mobile. Versions for other operating systems will be released shortly.
Wang Wei, Siano’s Vice President for Asia Business Development commented: ‘We are happy to broaden our CMMB offering beyond the silicon. For many TD-SCDMA device makers, the MBBMS protocol stack has been a bottleneck in their development plans and time tables, and Siano is now removing this hurdle for them.’