In what would appear to be yet another major blow to DVB-H as a technology, the South African Regulator (ICASA) has put back plans to allocate spectrum licenses, just days before the first round of the process was supposed to be complete, according to reports in the South African Business Report newspaper.
The reason for the delay appears to be that the regulator thinks that the spectrum allocation for the country’s digital switchover should first be completed before any spectrum is set aside for mobile TV, and Business Report puts it down to lobbying by the channel most likely to be left out in an auction, e.tv.
e.tv is a recently introduced (1998) TV channel which is separate from the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and its main rival Multichoice, which dominates direct to home satellite TV in South Africa and other parts of Africa, but which operates the only other network of transmission towers in the country other than SABC. Given that there are only two licenses to be awarded, if they are to be on different (and probably existing) transmission networks they must involve SABC and Multichoice which might leave e.tv in the cold.
The delay is indeterminate at this point and we had thought that the long standing two year plus DVB-H trial by Multichoice was about to lead to a live service in the country, given that the license application deadline has just passed.
Yet another live service based on DVB-H in a large country (population almost 49 million) with over 40 million handset owners, would have given the DVB-H eco-system a boost when it most needed it. In fact due to handsets being mostly unsubsidized there, and the main population being quite poor, the country would have to solve the issue of commissioning cheap handsets which may have been easy to then introduce to other DVB-H committed countries.
Given that the French shift to DVB-H has been slowed to a crawl, and that Spain still has political hurdles to overcome before it is introduced there, the next major countries to introduce DVB-H might waver. Certainly Poland is due to move shortly and India expects an auction sometime this year. Germany, which has an existing four city network lying in cobwebs, is caught up in political machinations between broadcast and cellular interests, but could be the next major country to launch DVB-H mobile TV services, if this can be resolved.
The ICASA licenses in South Africa were limited to bidders that had at least one transmission network, a content provider and a cellphone company, which pretty much picked out the winners as there are only three cellular operators, three content providers and two transmission networks.
That process may have left e.tv will no place at the table, and perhaps negotiations may now begin in earnest to find it one, to unblock the auction process.
The South African government however will be slightly upset, given that it was hoping for a mobile TV service to be up and running by June of this year, in time for the Confederation Soccer cup, held in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Rustenburg. However it would be a major blow if a system was not ready in time for the World Cup Soccer tournament to be held there in June 2010.
We would expect licenses would have to be issued by the last quarter of 2009 in order for anyone to stand a chance of being ready with devices and a network in time for the World Cup so this had better be patched up before then.