The twists and turns in the Mobile TV market place have led to multiple analyst groups denouncing it as ‘failed’ and instead embracing cellular and WiFi delivery of video as the way ahead, but this week China passed a key trigger point for mobile TV take off and there were wake up signs in both Latin America, as well as the US.
In May this year China Mobile, unhappy with the progress of CMMB Mobile TV sales, which were progressing (and possibly slowing) at around 1 million a month, withdrew its support for smart phones and top end devices and consulted with its handset vendors with a clear message, ‘bring down mobile TV to the masses.’ This meant that each handset vendor had to decide if it wanted to play lower down the market and for those which did, it meant designing a new device while sales stalled.
The Chinese SARFT (State Administration of Radio Film and TV) which originated the CMMB standard, had claimed that by the end of 2009 around 12 million CMMB devices had shipped. Our own figures place this closer to 5 million, with perhaps another 4 million sold during the early part of 2010, but it was definitely slowing.
The handset vendors have over the past few weeks put out new phones which include the mid tier and low end TD-SCDMA devices, and shipments have once again begun in earnest, with pre-order sales suggesting that shipments will be back to 1 million a month immediately.
Another factor slowing Mobile TV in China, was the price of content, which originally had been free for a year, and then turned to a combination of paid and free services. The new devices don’t attract a premium, but the CMMB service costs something like $1.50 a month for the paid portion of TV channels, far less than before China Mobile adjusted its strategy.
China Mobile currently has exclusivity of the CMMB signals until the second half of 2012, when they will be opened to China Mobile’s rivals by SARFT and at that stage W-CDMA and CMDA phones with CMMB may emerge.
If shipments of Telegent based analog TV chips in China and Latin America are anything to go by, there are a host of people in both regions that want TV on their mobile and don’t care if the picture is a little hazy or if it eats their battery too fast. Last week Telegent said it had shipped 90 million chips, mostly to these regions, which put analog TV on a mobile phone, having said it had shipped just 50 million a year ago. That suggests that once China gets digital Mobile TV available across the board, its consumer have the appetite to rapidly make it the largest Mobile TV market in the world, overtaking Japan’s active 70 million or so users and Korea’s 20 million plus. In fact if you count the Telegent chips that’s already happened. However most cellular operators don’t want to offer analog TV on their devices and instead look for interactive advertising as a major plank in their business models and for that a digital strategy makes more sense.
Meanwhile progress in Latin America on ISDB-Tb and its One Seg phone variant, make it look like Latin America could swiftly become another major consumer market for Mobile TV.
Shipments of chips to this part of the world for One seg devices reached 5 million across all Latin America and are set to drive up towards 12 million, says chip supplier Siano Mobile Silicon, which has just launched a chip for tuning and demodulating the ISDB-T full 13 segments, for inclusion in set tops and TV sets there.
‘HD on TV is starting here now,’ said Alon Ironi, CEO of Siano, ‘There are one or two devices here already, and there will be a flood of devices by the end of 2010. There is a government push to complete the deployment of digital TV out in the villages and rural communities and already 27 of the major cities have ISDB-Tb signals. In Sao Paulo there are 28 channels available in One seg (Mobile TV version).’
But despite Brazil taking the lead, and making its decision to go ISDB-T 4 years ago, the other countries in the region are catching up. They can borrow the exact standard, and not go creating their own variants and can piggy-back on the manufacturing which Brazil has set up, and also profit from its experience in implementation costs and consumer uptake. This probably puts Argentina and Chile only about 1 year behind Brazil and we understand that already broadcast transmissions of ISDB-Tb are up in running in the some of the largest cities in Argentina, the most significant being Buenos Aires which has 3 million inhabitants, but in its broader metropolitan area 13 million, out of the entire 41 million Argentine population. That’s roughly one third of the country served by just a couple of transmitters. Given that the country has a 92% urbanized population, its implementation should be substantially cheaper per head than in Brazil.
In Chile much the same is true with the Santiago, which has already been covered, having around 5 million people, roughly a third of that country’s inhabitants, with the rest mostly dotted up a single coastline and easy to reach with transmitters.
With Japan being the originator of ISDB-T today there are at least another 16 countries, all of them apart from the Philippines and Thailand, in Latin America, which have either officially adopted the standard or have said very loudly that they plan to.
This includes Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador , Costa Rica, Paraguay, Bolivia, Belize, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Honduras and Columbia, to add to Brazil Argentina and Chile.
Such adoption may indeed focus more aggressively on the TV version of the standard, unlike Brazil where handsets have got off the ground more quickly, with something like 10 million TVs and set tops expected to be shipped across the region during 2011, leading to an explosion during 2012, after a 2010 of only a few hundred thousand device shipments.
One of the keys to the ISDB-Tb standard is the Ginga interactivity standard, similar in principle to the original interactivity built into ISDB-T pages in Japan, but based on locally written middleware. Operators and broadcasters are both expected to follow Japan’s lead and built interactive advertising systems around the Ginga standard to develop new revenue models.
The companies who are set to reap this huge analog to digital harvest are the Japanese and Korean set top makers such as Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and LG, chip makers of course of which Siano is one, and Broadcom, which sees the TV opportunity in Latin America as so vast that for once it has ventured out of the comfort zone of US dominated technical standards and produced its own ISDB-Tb set top chip. Also local TV makers SEMP Toshiba, a long standing local Toshiba joint venture and local CE maker Positivo.
All of this combines with this week’s story about Siano launching the second ATSC M/H chip for the US mobile TV market (See separate story), putting mobile TV on the front foot in most major regions, except of course poor Europe.