The European Commission has managed to get the European member states to vote to endorse its strategy on Mobile TV that it put forward in July. That strategy includes pushing DVB-H as a standard and making UHF available for services to be launched.
The next steps will now include the preparation of guidelines for authorization procedures (selection of digital rights management technologies) and the addition of DVB-H to the official list of standards. All 27 EU Member States are duty bound to support and encourage the use of any standard on this official list.
The statement goes on to talk about all Europeans being able to get mobile TV for about the same price of a phone call,
‘European mobile TV is a step closer to success following today’s endorsement by the Council of the Commission’s strategy for creating economies of scale in this important sector,’ said Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for the Information Society and Media. ‘This shows that political resolve and market developments are in tune to ensure this potentially multi-billion Euro market is on the right track by mid-2008.’
She also called on the minority of governments who are still reluctant, partly for internal reasons, to endorse DVB-H as European standard to join the majority quickly.
But the policy of the European Commission is as behind the time as the statement it prepared. The release was clearly written some months ago awaiting the rubber stamp of the vote, and referred to ‘trials’ in the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland, which have now launched around the time that the European Soccer Cup was played (which ran in Austria and Switzerland this Summer).
The pro-DVB-H policy finds European telcos unconvinced of the benefits of DVB-H, at loggerheads with broadcasters over who pays for its implementation, with Germany and Austria already pushing phones which can pick up the already free to air local DVB-T services. Germany and France are both now back at square one on planning a DVB-H network and unlikely to see services before 2010, while the UK has a regulator that just cannot find any UHF to contribute for a service prior to 2012.
The arrival of DVB-T as an alternative and the gradually improvement in data services which support streaming TV, will all move on considerably while these major markets wait for DVB-H. In that time frame a DVB-SH satellite will also be licensed and begin transmitting, further marginalizing DVB-H.
The Commission says that it intends to work closely with the Member States in the coming months on authorization and licensing regimes, and to look at issues such as service layer interoperability and rights management applied to mobile TV. That would be about 2 years too late or too early depending on how you see mobile TV. There has already been a war on DRM, and the likelihood of there being service interoperability when technologies are still unlikely to be homogenized, is premature.
The Commission reckons that mobile TV could be a market worth up to €20 billion annually by 2011, reaching some 500 million customers worldwide. Sorry but those figures need to be revised downwards given the slower speed of service launches and the fact that most services are going free to air and will rely on a slow build up of advertising revenues not suubscriptions.