There’s an interesting side effect from AMD taking over ATI technologies, in that ATI was working towards the day when half of the world has DVB-H or similar datacasting mobile TV, and now AMD can add it to its own stack of abilities.
We have heard that both Intel and Dell plan to move forward rapidly to integrate mobile TV platforms onto their devices, and while the US cellco Verizon seems to have placed a huge bet on MediaFLO being the local basis for mobile TV, there’s every chance that at least one DVB-H system will challenge that.
So at some stage we expected DVB-H tuners and demodulators embedded on the top 10% to 15% of laptops and Ultra Mobile PCs. AMD’s ATI has been working from the point of view of building out from the video processing capabilities to its own Imageon DVB-H/T chip set, and has this week added software from VisualOn, which decodes H.264 video and AAC+ audio streams, for playback.
When Imageon first came out a year ago it was targeted at handsets, but now the announcement aims it more firmly at handsets plus PDAs, with the distinction being that where there’s not enough on-board processing to manage the number crunching behind H.264 decoding, the VisualOn software on the ATI chip can managed the job. AMD has aimed the Imageon at 3D gaming, video and image capture and MPEG 4 playback and said at the time it was the first OpenGL compliant device on the handheld market.
But this just serves to remind us that the day when AMD has to match Intel steps to put onboard DVB-H into devices other than handsets is just around the corner, and already in New York, where Modeo is bringing to market its DVB-H service and outside of the US, in Italy or instance, the market for laptops that watch TV must already be taking off. TV reception may be one of the key areas of differentiation for laptops going forwards and the integration of MediaFLO, at least in the US, is going to be of prime concern come its launch in the second quarter.
Not only is Qualcomm promising a DVB-H tuner and demodulator but it will combine it with a MediaFLO one during the first or second quarter. If this was to be used with the Snapdragon processors that Qualcomm has developed for low power multimedia, then suddenly we would have Qualcomm surging into the PC market with components, almost as fast as AMD is surging into the handset markets, especially over mobile TV.
Snapdragon was launched in November and is based around a 1GHz customized ARM core designed by Qualcomm, called Scorpion, paired with a 128-bit SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) processor and a 600MHz digital signal processor to accelerate multimedia applications.
No doubt Qualcomm will defend its MediaFLO turf by asking a hefty slice of the sale price of any components that address MediaFLO, although it has said openly that any company that is already paying it for access to its intellectual property may take MediaFLO for no extra charge (see separate story).
Meanwhile this week Microtune said that it has gone into volume with its mobile TV Tuners and taken its second round of orders from LG Electronics which LG will put into its next-generation device in Europe. LG is one of the core DVB-H handset suppliers in Italy.
Microtune offers a hybrid DVB-T/DVB-H mobile TV tuner, which can be used on low power or higher power devices for the laptop and portable media player markets, which it says is already on sale in retail in parts of Europe and can operate in both UHF and VHF Band III.