German newspapers are now giving the middle of March for the date when a new German DVB-H license will get either issued or at least put up for grabs. A lot of rhetoric this week was produced on the back of key comments made by German officials who are part of a joint committee made up of the regional media authorities, about the conditions under which a DVB-H may be once again granted.
Instead of giving the spectrum to T-Mobile, as everyone expected, which said a few months back that it now wanted to take over the DVB-H license in order to offload the soccer content it has recently acquired rights to, from its 3G network, the regulator is likely to insist on yet another auction.
This time it wants to ensure that the auction goes to someone that has all of its ducks in a row. It wants to offer a ten year license, but says that whoever gets it must already have in place agreements with network operators, broadcasters and mobile operators and describe a business model that it thinks is viable.
Well we have seen the license in broadcaster hands and the lack of co-operation between them and cellular operators is now well established. There are two versions of what happened there, the Mobile 3.0 version and the cellco version, the first being that none of the cellcos would speak to Mobile 3.0 because they had failed to win the contract, the other was that Mobile 3.0 only made one phone call to someone junior in Vodafone and then gave up. Whatever the truth of those two versions, the contract is likely to go to cellco hands this time around.
We think that these comments are all about orchestrating an auction process where the cellular operators cannot be undercut. T-Mobile will pull in Vodafone to ensure it has at least one rival on board, they already both have content licenses from broadcasters and T-Mobile already has mobile rights to major soccer games; and TDF, which owns Media Broadcast, which built the initial four city network for Mobile 3.0, has all the tower rights anyone could want for a national DVB-H network.
The negotiation will be all about how little of Germany the consortium will have to build out in the early years, when the business model is untried, and about whether or not T-Mobile will share any of its soccer content with Vodafone, in return for paying for part of the network build and throwing its lot in with DVB-H.
Both operators tried to convince the world that DVB-T phones were going fine in Germany and that DVB-H wasn’t needed, but after an initial fuss it turned out that only a few thousand devices were deployed, showing that it was done purely as a spoiling exercise for Mobile 3.0.
The Mobile 3.0 consortium still owns the network in the top four Germany cities and will be wanting to sell it ready made to the winning bidder. But of course there can only be one bidder, since the cost of building a DVB-H network is probably beyond any of the smaller cellular operators, and no other group apart from a cellco lead consortium can offer the cellco relationships that the regulator will insist upon.
Meanwhile in France the country’s regulator the CSA, is trying to wake up DVB-H interest once again according to Broadband TV News, calling a meeting with mobile operators Orange France, SFR and Bouygues Telecom and broadcasters, TV channels and broadcast operators to discuss it. Orange has said fairly publicly that it cannot make money with the TV channels that have already been pre-selected for the service by the CSA (who ever heard of a regulator choosing the content for a service ‘ what was it thinking?) It issued mobile TV licenses to TF1, France 2, France 3, Arte, Canal+, M6, BFM TV, Direct 8, Eurosport, i-tele, NRJ 12, NT1, Virgin 17, W9, EuropaCorp and Orange Sport.
All of the cellular operators in France now have their own pay TV services and need to set the content agenda on any mobile TV services. Expect no breakthroughs soon.