China is rapidly ramping up its mobile TV coverage and from a pre-Christmas position of 35 Cities with terrestrial transmissions, the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) which is driving the service, will target of 175 by the end of the first quarter 2009. Nationwide coverage is supposed to be in place by the end of 2009.
This makes it the most rapidly expanding mobile TV service in the world, and our earlier assessments that it would be slow to take off in china, due to only a few Cities having access, appear now to have been confounded by the speed and aggression with which SARFT is acting.
SARFT has let it be known that China Mobile will include CMMB chips in many of its TDS CDMA phone designs and China Telecom into its CDMA phones, which suggests that the 600,000 or so devices which have been shipped with Mobile TV chips up until now, will accelerate dramatically once those networks are in place.
And this week SARFT licensed handset vendors to begin distributing in Hong Kong, where its signals will shortly reach. We have no idea how this affects local incumbents like PCCW, which have their own trials with MediaFLO and DVB-H, and a service built around the Cell Broadcast System, which is already in place, but we imagine that it will also accommodate the service.
China has already demonstrated a strong appetite for video on handsets, and despite having no digital TV broadcast service, US chip maker Telegent has sold 3 million chips into handsets capable of picking up analog TV, through deals with local handsets makers ZTE and TianYu. That’s 3 million devices when the picture is poor, reception patchy and battery life short, but already the first swing devices are coming available (one from Chinese company Tianyu), which receive both analog TV now and have a CMMB chip in for later.
CMMB devices are dominated by demodulator chips from local suppliers Innofidei and Telepath and from Israeli designer Siano. Japanese company Sharp will enter the market this quarter and other big US and European chip vendors may join shortly pick any from Broadcom, Qualcomm and NXP.
The handsets makers which are dominating are ZTE, TianYu (branded as K-touch) and Lenovo, not known for handsets, but working with DVB-T/H specialist DiBcom. We expect Samsung and LG, to join, along with Sharp shortly, while Nokia has promised it will not support non-DVB-H mobile TV phones any time soon.
But the CMMB standard is already being talked up by African company S2M, and there is a possibility that later this year one of the Indian licenses could be awarded to a company which plans to use the same technology. At that point Nokia may capitulate and make phones which offer CMMB.
There are already portable media players from Huaqi and BBK Electronics, and more devices are expected from the international community, perhaps Dell will make a move. USB dongle makers are also all aiming for this market including GreatWall, Yuan Haiwei, TechVision and Aisino, a move which is sure to attract larger overseas multinationals shortly during 2009.
All of this should drive China, from a standing start to be a 5 to 6 million device market in 2009 alone and more than double that size a year later. Given the general malaise and lack of belief in mobile TV which exists in the US and Europe, many US and European companies may miss out altogether on even making an attempt that this opportunity.