The European broadcast mobile TV standard DVB-H has suffered yet another blow this week when Austria announced that it will switch off its service in December this year.
The service is operated by TDF’s Media & Broadcast, and sold to consumers on 3 Austria, Telekom Austria and Orange Austria handsets. Combined they are thought to have sold just 10,000 subscriptions to DVB-H services.
In March this year Swisscom, which also launched DVB-H service at the time of the last soccer European cup, alongside the Austria launch, said that it would ditch its DVB-H network in favor of 3GPP streaming, blaming the decision on the fact that no devices were available at the right price.
The German service has also been switched off for some time, and although there was a brief period when T-Mobile was swamped with streaming requests for its soccer live service, and it entered negotiations with the German regulator to take this network over, it now seems that it will remain shut.
Italy pioneered DVB-H in Europe and reached just under 1 million customers over a three year period from 2005 to 2008, and doesn’t appear to be interested in switching off the network, but it has never issued further data on its success, and meanwhile the Netherlands has also followed suit and stopped taking new DVB-H customers.
DVB-H is a separate network which sends a new TV signal to mobile phones. Unlike all the successful technologies around the world in broadcast mobile TV, it requires a brand new network to be built often costing $200 million or so (the quoted price for Italy) in broadcast equipment alone. ISDB-T, which is a huge success and ATSC M/H, slide a cellular signal inside the actual TV broadcast and just require investment of a just over $100,000 per transmitter.
Meanwhile, although cellular streaming can supply a handful of parallel TV streams per base station, it will not be until around 2020 that all handset owners could get streamed TV simultaneously, without overloading existing networks. Instead users are mostly confined to either using WiFi to deliver streamed video or have to be the among the first 20 in any given cell to request channels or will find they cannot get coverage on most US and European cellular networks.
This latest reverse, along with many other less public reverses (for instance the Philippines was supposed to have at least 3 DVB-H networks but they have all now quietly closed) should lead to a major rethink by the DVB-Project. It had planned to put mobile TV signals into the DVB-T2 standard, but lost its nerve at the last minute. Instead it left open the door to retrofit a standard within DVB-T2, later, if it was needed. It must almost certainly revisit that decision in the light of ISDB-T’s global success, especially an almost clean sweep of the Latin American countries, and accelerate these plans or become the worst positioned broadcast standard in the world for mobile broadcast.
In December 2009 the Broadcast Mobile Convergence Forum (BMCO) tried a last ditch alliance to save DVB-H in Europe, pulling together as many backers of DVB-H to create a guaranteed market for cheap DVB-H devices. It should have meant a handful of cheap and popular devices to have DVB-H by this Summer, but the effort has clearly failed or at best is too late to save the standard. Nokia did put out a DVB-H version of its N8 phone, but this is not cheap and is only just delivered.