Mobile TV using ATSC M/H in the US will only take off when a number of key market conditions are met, and one of these we have always said is the arrival of a second chip design that supports the standard, to go with the one that ATSC inventor LG Electronics delivered over a year ago.
There have been false alarms from companies like MaxLinear, which claimed such an achievement back in early September, but finally it is Siano Mobile Silicon, which built much of its Mobile TV success by dominating the market for Chinese CMMB chips, which has come to market next and this week launches the SMS1530 chip, and says that it developed the chip in collaboration with LG Electronics, principal developer of the ATSC M/H broadcast standard (along with Harris and Samsung).
Siano now has designs for DVB-H, DVB-T, CMMB, T-DMB, ISDB-T for both Japan and Latin America as well as ATSC M/H ‘ all the dominant mobile TV platforms, and has many of them on single multi-standard chips. In almost every case it has multiple design wins and customers.
Siano did not want to go into any depth on this cooperation with LG, but clearly this is LG Electronics going to the global leader in Mobile TV broadcast chips and providing the kind of volume promises that made it worthwhile, in order to get Siano to help legitimize this market. LG probably provided all the ATSC know how to Siano and Siano brought is wealth of knowledge in how to bring tuner accuracy, low power demodulation (and low price) on such a chip down to an acceptable level for handsets.
Siano’s new chip is both a tuner and a demodulator, as all its chips are, while the false alarm from MaxLinear was in early September when a system needed to get under way for Dell’s laptop devices which had promised ATSC M/H on multiple occasions. The way that was achieved was to put a MaxLinear tuner which had a DVB-T demodulator, but which also use the same tuned signal to feed an LG built ATSC demodulator chip. The device also tuned analog TV. That way the handset could pick up TV in both the US and Europe using two different signals. Such a chip would be too power hungry in that multi chip format to transfer to a handset, leaving the LG chip the only real device on the market plus one that Samsung uses, which is a bit of a mystery. The Samsung device might be the LG chip or one that Samsung has developed internally, which it doesn’t sell on the open market.
The MaxLinear MxL111SF chips are also being used in dongles devices from Hauppauge Computer Works and we assume that the demodulation part of the process is also handed by the original LG chip.
But the bigger part of this announcement isn’t technical, it is a statement of political will from US broadcasters, in particular Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the biggest independent broadcasting groups in the US.
Mark Aitken, Director of Advanced Technologies for Sinclair said that he expects that by the end of 2010 there will be 100-150 TV stations transmitting in ATSC-MH, scattered across 40 metropolitan areas in the US, which would be in line with previous forecasts and an improvement on the 70 or so that are in operation already.
But then he added, ‘By the end of 2011, given the activities of many broadcast television ventures and alliances, it is expected that there may be up to 500 TV stations covering the 50 to 70 largest metropolitan areas which account for more than 65% of the US population.’
That quote, which was carried in the Siano release, shows how the tiny Israeli company has been persuaded that ATSC M/H was not going away. There has been massive pressure among the iPhone and Android lovers in the cellular market to get the whole US to think purely about WiFi (and 3G) delivered streaming video as the future of handset video. Well it’s not, not if the TV broadcasting community has anything to say about it.
Alon Ironi, Siano’s CEO said, ‘Siano has accumulated considerable knowledge and experience in emerging mobile TV markets, and we believe that American consumers will embrace Mobile DTV, which offers them easy access to their favorite local and national TV content anytime, anywhere. Products using the SMS1530 will offer the consumers the best TV viewing experience ‘ indoors as well as outdoors, long battery life and mobility.’
The chip has already gone in samples to key supporters making devices for the ATSC M/H community and we know that not only has Siano managed to sign 5 accessory builders for supplies of the new chip, but claims it has also landed a tier one cellular handset maker to put it into an Android phone.
Android is key here for the development of Mobile TV in the US. Apple, which sells content directly and has no interest in letting consumers get free to air content, had the power to block Mobile TV while it was the dominant force in US smartphones, but as players like Motorola, HTC and Samsung begin to get behind Android, it means that multiple TV applications can be build that go with such Mobile TV delivery, including those which take advantage of interactivity and advertising, a sure fire route to interest cellular operators in the same business model that has worked in Japan and Korea and which is taking hold now in Brazil and the rest of Latin America.
Which of those handset maker has taken the Siano chip is a mystery, it could be any of them. Motorola has dealings with Siano in China for CMMB, and ZTE has sold millions of phones with Siano CMMB chips in China and may use it as a springboard into the US, though it hardly counts as tier one quite yet. All we know for sure is that it can’t be Apple or Nokia, because they don’t use Android.
Siano says that it has already completed a successful field trial conducted in Washington DC, and that might mean it was in one of the handsets provided there, which were by LG itself and Samsung.
We spoke to Alon Ironi, CEO at Siano this week and he said , ‘The performance in Washington using our new chip was excellent, there was good in-building penetration and noise immunity. We are capable of designing-in diversity into our chips, as we showed in the CMMB design, but there was no need for this in ATSC M/H because the signal is so clear.’
Ironi did not want to be drawn on likely chip numbers but said that during 2011 this will be a slow market with just a few hundred thousand devices sold, and that we would have to wait until 2012 before sales were in the millions and 2013 before it was in the tens of millions. The next key crucial step is for one of the major broadcasters to create mobile affiliates groups and build a nationwide channel footprint on mobile.