It’s a very large ‘I told you so’ to the people at BT who said that 30% of a UK DAB multiplex was enough to launch the Movio mobile TV service with 5 TV channels. Last year Faultline told representatives of BT that its visual quality was below that of streamed cellular services and that it would never take off, despite its deal with Virgin Mobile.
BT Movio, through Virgin, attracted just 10,000 subscribers in over a year, and mostly this poor showing was because it was delivering video with about 25% or less of the data rate that a comparable DVB-H network (or any other mobile TV technology) would use, with a consequent reduction in screen resolution, giving way to jerky movements, ghosting and insufficient video details. Virgin said it would close down its service early next year, while the BT MVNO never even thought Movio was worth launching on its own service.
The service was launched by BT Wholesale, using DAB IP on a national radio multiplex, rented through GCap Media, and it has said that from next June it will return the lease of the capacity to GCap, hence Virgin’s need to give up too.
The service has caused damage to the public perception of mobile TV in the UK, but we doubt that it has ruined BT’s ambition here. BT execs told us last year that the interface and the entire infrastructure was what Movio was about and that it would work just as well with a DVB-H service, once that arrives, so expect BT to try again. It was the lack of any suitable UHF spectrum, with little prospect of any becoming available, that pushed BT to try the spectrum hampered DAB IB service. It’s not that DAB IP as a concept is weak (it is a little rough on battery power) but it would need to be launched using dedicated spectrum.
This is the reason that Faultline has continually said that unlike Italy, France and Germany, all of which have sorted out UHF spectrum for DVB-H, the UK may have to fall back on the S-Band satellite approach of Alcatel-Lucent, usually referred to as DVB-SH, and pitched as DVB-H from a satellite. Another option is to use the 5 MHz of one way data TDD spectrum allocated in 3G licenses to offer broadcast TV in the cellular spectrum.