The OMVC has a new mantra ‘ ‘Mobile DTV will reach 77 million households, two thirds of US homes, by the end of 2011.’ Its old mantra, that it was already available on 76 stations, throughout 32 markets, is now officially retired. The OMVC is the Open Mobile Video Coalition, a group of broadcasters which has said very little this past 12 months, except spout its original mantra.
But over the next 12 months we expect it to do more than spout the new one. This is the way of broadcast mobile TV, the idea of setting up a separate broadcast system to send TV signals to phones, instead of sending them over the cellular network.
The world, and the US in particular, is broadly split into two camps ‘ and here at Faultline we think they both have a future ‘ that is people who think that the way to get content to a portable device is through WiFi or Cellular ‘ networks which already exist, and that it should be delivered on a one to one unicast basis, and those who think that TV on phones should emulate TV development and go over the air as a broadcast first on a new broadcast medium, before the equivalent of VoD is introduced.
From a user perspective there is no real need to have linear broadcasts to handsets and tablets, because one of its main purposes is for scheduled programming to a) deliver adverts and b) get people to be interested in a particular series so that they can watch it catch up in future. TV already gives us the ability to view new content we didn’t know about, and social networks point us to catch up content that we should have watched which our peer groups tell us about. So VoD conceptually is ALL that anyone wants on a phone or a tablet. Is that right?
Well if that was right, then why are the 43 channels that Time Warner Cable is delivering as linear channels on its iPad application, so contentious. If no-one was going to watch them, why go to court over it (see separate story). The same goes for the 300 channels that Cablevision plans to deliver in the same way ‘ through WiFi to the iPad.
Certainly there are many instances ‘when you are watching TV’ when you want to catch what’s on another channel, without interrupting the football, baseball, basketball that Dad is watching on the main TV set. So perhaps linear DOES have a place on the tablet. You might also want that when you are away from home. Right now these particular iPad apps only allow you to watch through the broadband line of the operator providing pay TV to the home, but that’s a rights dust up, and not really relevant to what consumers want.
The lessons from Japan and Korea, where broadcast mobile TV networks are the norm, with over 80 million users in Japan, are still valid in the US and the west, if and when the same conditions apply. And that is that if you host a live event, such as a popular sporting event and broadcast it live to handsets or other portable devices ‘ if you use a unicast technology it will break your network. It still almost breaks broadband fixed networks when this happens, so it would certainly break a cellular network, unused to volume video.
What happened in South Korea and Japan was that as broadcast video became available on smaller devices, unicast streaming went through asymptotic growth. In other worlds when linear TV was made part of the set up in those countries, VoD was used more and more often for catch up.
And that suits very much the condition of cellular networks in both the US and the rest of the world. If you want to show the Olympic 100 meter final, it had better be broadcast, but for days after people will want to relive it ‘ having been told about it by their friends, usually through social networks.
So it is still very much the case that countries which have totally abandoned mobile broadcast TV will still finds needs for it, and that countries which have yet to have it, such as the US (we don’t count Qualcomm’s FLO TV because it went to so few people) will still gain some relief on their mobile networks by having it.
So while the OMVC may sound like a voice in the wilderness trying to make a technology happen which nobody wants, it is still odds on to eventually succeed. It will take until countries like the US have 80% reach with the second generation of LTE before all user video could afford to be streamed by cellular networks, sometime around 2020.
But the piece of the equation which has not yet been addressed by the OMVC is the availability of devices. Japan shows that although its service had national signal availability in 2005, it has only reached 4% of devices by the end of 2006. It then took off radically as at first a handful of devices were made available with a receiver chip for its 1 seg system. The following year there were 23% of devices shipped with such as chip in, then 44% and the most recent figure is over 80%.
In the US the system broadcasters use is ATSC M/H or ATSC Mobile DTV Standard A/153 and our report carried out in 2009 forecast the same percentages in the US ‘ 4 million in 2010 because we expected a launch halfway through the year, 42 million during 2012 and on up to 161 million installed devices. We put a number of proviso’s into this scenario, and we are still waiting for the handset trigger ‘ quite simply either a handset maker or a major US cellular operator, to put the capability into a top of the range handset or tablet.
Already a Korean company Valups has said that it will begin shipping its Tivizen product line that adapts the ATSC M/H signal to output it again to localized WiFi and it can be used to power up and feed TV into an Apple iPad (see pic).
That device has been ready for a year but the fact that it will only begin to ship at $99 in the US in June seems to suggest that everyone is waiting for either a coverage tipping point, or a time when everyone else is ready with devices, so that a big advertising onslaught will hit the US.
The OMVC also highlights Cydle with its iPhone cradle for MDTV reception and portable WiFi devices from Crestech as well as RCA showing a new line of portable TV sets and prototype cell phones from LG Electronics and Samsung as well as Dell’s prototype netbook computer with built-in Mobile DTV, plus a variety of USB receivers for laptops on hand from manufacturers such as DTVinteractive, Hauppauge and Pixtree.
So we remain at the start of device availability and someone has to come out with a top end smart phone or a tablet with a native capability for ATSC M/H which becomes a major hit. Tablets are the best way in, because most of them are not sold with a cellular subsidy and so need no blessing from a cellular operator.
Potentially local TV companies may get into the same kind of rights issues that Time Warner Cable and Cablevision have got into this week, once again with affiliates being told they don’t have the right to broadcast national TV networks to a second type of screen, but this is more likely to be resolved naturally with advertising which reaches these screens increasing the effectiveness of broadcast channels. The TWC issue is with cable networks which typically seek payment for a pay TV channel to offer its channels, so it’s not quite the same thing in a free to air channel.
This time last year Fox and NBC backed the creation of a US national ATSC M/H network by joining with group of broadcasters which formed the Pearl Project under the name of the Pearl Mobile DTV Company. This now embraces Belo, Cox Media, Scripps, Fox, Gannett Broadcasting, Hearst TV, ION TV, Media General, Meredith, NBC, Post-Newsweek Stations and Raycom Media.
The new grouping said that during 2011 it would promise live events, local and national news from print and electronic sources, as well as sports and entertainment programming alongside on-demand video, all as part of the service. ATSC M/H can broadcast data as well as video to portable devices.
There is still the issue of how CBS and ABC will respond, and could that be by providing the kernel of yet another national broadcast grouping going head to head against Pearl.
There always had to be some temptation once AT&T lost its iPhone exclusive for it to embrace Mobile DTV in order to replace its iPhone appeal. The iPhone has been responsible for almost all AT&T Mobility customer growth during the past two years and it will need multiple initiatives to replace it now it has gone.
Given that two of the leading US smartphone suppliers are LG and Samsung, which virtually own the intellectual property on ATSC M/H, you would have expected more moves from these two so far, but any one of Motorola, Samsung, and HTC could also be among the first to include ATSC M/H coverage integrated into a device. The BIG surprise would be if either RIM, which has always focused on the enterprise space, and Apple which has always wanted content to be paid for rather than free to air, were to include the capability in a device. In the past Apple has latched onto a technology just as it has come into fashion, and broadcast mobile TV could be so out of fashion, that if Apple was to suddenly embrace it, it might be the trigger that the US needs to make the OMVC dreams come true and make mobile TV broadcasting relevant in the US for the first time.