Ericsson has been threatening to break from cover with its approach for mobile TV, but apart from the odd snippet of information saying that it would back MBMS, the UMTS multicasting standard, and one speech given at one of the Far East major cellular conferences, it has pretty much kept its hand close to its chest and we have always expected to hear more about it when version 6 of its base station software was available, which was always going to be the middle of this year.
Up until now, Ericsson has provided systems for handling 3G unicast mobile TV with its Content Delivery system and video gateway products.
But this week 3 Australia has taken the first trial of the MBMS service, as far as we know, the first of its kind anywhere, a move likely to be adopted broadly by the end of this year, and create an entirely new front for mobile TV technology, which we have been shouting about for some time, and which will see a third, if not fourth strand to cellular TV efforts everywhere.
MBMS ‘ which stands for Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service ‘ was once predicted to kill off DVB-H, but being over a year behind it, perhaps as far as two for genuine implementation, DVB-H and other systems which rely on the creation of a new and separate network in different spectrum, such as MediaFLO, DVB-SH and to some extent T-DMB, were all quick to move to implementation around the world.
However that’s unlikely to mean that cellular operators won’t broadly adopt MBMS now that the time is ripe, and the acquisition of Tandberg now looks to be very much a part of Ericsson’s mobile TV strategy every bit as much as it was a way of creating a unified IPTV ‘ Mobile TV platform that would utilize the special Ericsson skillset in advanced IMS implementations.
Video needs to be encoded and for the first time in Europe at the IBC show in Amsterdam next month, Tandberg will have on show its encoding system for mobile TV, a very different affair from its run of the mill H.264 HD encoding that has been its mainstream for the past 12 to 18 months.
That system was announced it March, one month after Ericsson bought the company, and has been paraded at just a few US shows, and will now make an appearance in Europe at IBC. It’s clear that Tandberg was never going to make a ton of money out of the mobile markets, and that while it and Harmonic, along with Motorola and Scientific Atlanta carved up the IPTV, Cable and Satellite encoding market between them, that they were late starters in mobile TV until they had a clear directive from new parent Ericsson. There just isn’t as much encoding power required for mobile TV, and much of it is not real time encoding direct from a satellite signal, so standard hardware systems instead of specialist hardware, are just as likely to be at the center of a standalone mobile TV encoder unless it is one encoding suite creating digital video outputs for a variety of handheld and fixed devices ‘ such as the tier one European telcos that want to offer both IPTV and mobile TV.
But with around 80 global trials for one form of mobile TV or another stretching back to 2004, and each one of these likely to lead to a service, requiring up to 25 mobile TV channels plus regional variations, it means that both Ericsson and Tandberg are very late to the game ‘ so how are they going to prevail, especially with Europe mandating DVB-H as the technology of choice for mobile TV?
Well, easy, is the answer. Most mobile TV has resided to date on streaming servers delivering data as very low bit rate streams on top of a switched cellular service. And to do that mobile operators have had to allow TV streams to compromise the amount of voice that any one base station can support, with maximums of around 8 concurrent TV viewers per base station before either the backhaul is full or the voice capability of the base station suffers. And that’s with appalling video quality due to a low data rate.
It has always been understood that unicast streams would one day be relegated to the video on demand element of mobile TV, once better ways to deliver QVGA video were established. Right now companies like Orange in France and the Sprint PCS and Verizon VCast streaming services in the US, have tons and tons of unicast streaming channels, Orange has 63 at last count, but it makes sense that as soon as there is a better way to get the more popular channels to customers, that a number of strategy changes must happen.
First the most popular channels will be broadcast on the new separate networks, with some of this being delivered to view later, in the form of clip casts, data files delivered in the spare capacity of a DVB-H or MediaFLO network. Then the less frequently viewed content can be relegated to two forms of VoD, streamed and file delivery. There will need to be an upgrade to the quality of handsets and more storage will have to be put on them anyway to add DVR functions, so unicast delivery can be higher quality files being delivered when the network is not busy, rather like P2P delivery in the internet is delivered. Some VoD content could also be streamed, but most people would be watching the higher resolution, more popular channels.
Some people believe that this leaves no room for MBMS and that it is an either/or strategy for MBMS and DVB-H, but Faultline doesn’t see it that way. DVB-H in particular is a protocol and a solution that favors a broadcaster. It comes out of the DVB Project, and it always considered its job providing technology suitable for broadcasters, and we feel it has done this. Installing a DVB-H service can be done in a number of ways, but many of them re-use existing antenna, power cables and towers that the major TV networks already have in place, whether it is a broadcaster which owns them, or a central agency that works for broadcasters.
Because of this, all around the world, adoption of DVB-T for digital TV has almost automatically meant the eventual adoption of DVB-H by an individual broadcaster or by a consortium which has a broadcaster in.
But that leaves content selection and negotiation and most likely advertising sales, in the hands of the broadcaster and the cellular operator asking the question ‘What’s in it for me?’ Most of these services require a cellular operator to carry out the marketing and in some case the subsidy of handsets, so there is some ARPU for the cellular operator, but there’s little future for that cellular operator’s existing content relationships or a chance to get a piece of the potentially lucrative mobile TV advertising market.
It’s different for each operator but many of them will move eventually to a three tier strategy, with broadcast TV over DVB-H or MediaFLO or DVB-SH or T-DMB or whatever technology is in favor locally; high margin top of the range content delivered over an MBMS service, entirely controlled by cellular operators because it uses their existing infrastructure, and unicast playing a supporting role to both. MBMS delivered content will be contracted for by the cellular operator and any advertising that comes in against it will belong either solely to the cellco or shared with a content owner.
So that ends up with a model where MBMS is the equivalent of fixed cable TV, DVB-H takes a role similar to free to air broadcasts, and Unicast runs a VoD support role for both. We call this the blended model and any software that can support this at the handset, but which doesn’t show the consumer any difference between the three sources, may have the power to become a universal open platform. Finally if you add placeshifting (as 3 already offers in other territories) you have a four tier strategy from a single device.
It would be very hard for the European Commission to come down hard on Ericsson, which is a big European market leader, and also on any operator using MBMS from Ericsson, if it was also using DVB-H in parallel.
We believe that Ericsson will work to a position where it can support this and will be pushing a ‘cost of ownership’ sales process at operators who will see that as a software upgrade this is a service that is easy to support as long as each operator can afford a spare 5 MHz of spectrum to dedicated to such a service. MBMS doesn’t even need dedicated spectrum as it can switch itself on as a TV channel begins to be watched, takes up no more spectrum when a second or third or 100 people also watch the same channel, just telling their handsets which spectrum channel to find it in. When everybody attached to one base station stops watching that channel, the spectrum that it uses is returned to the pool for voice and other activity.
It is only a strategy like this, and one that will integrate with Telco driven IPTV services that use IMS and a single encoder base for both, that will see Tandberg overtake the shrewd Thomson Grass Valley unit that has made itself an end to end player in all forms of mobile TV, including encoding, without going head to head with Nokia to try to steal away its huge DVB-H advantage, a technology that it virtually invented.
The Tandberg mobile TV encoding system sits on the iPlex encoding range that it inherited when it acquired SkyStream Networks, adapted and renamed as mPlex. It has eliminated those parts of the H.264 standard which use up a lot of processing power on the client side, by embracing the baseline profile of H.264, rather than the main profile, dropping computationally complex advances and not using any Bidirectional frames.
Ericsson has said as early as two years ago that it is developing mobile TV products based on MBMS and DVB-H with the DVB-H products really just for Sony Ericsson, with chipsets embedded in them from Ericsson which allows support for MBMS, BCMCS and DVB-H. BCMCS is the multicasting equivalent of MBMS but on CDMA 2000 systems, the Qualcomm system.
Sony Ericsson has already shown a concept device called the Adriana, with a 10 GB DVR, which at present only works with DVB-H networks, but which, with the addition of handset components could also be a mobile TV for both DVB-H and MBMS (See pic). It is also known to be working on a Bravia phone, taking the Sony digital TV and screen technology from its flat screen TVs and putting it into a DVB-H/MBMS handset.
Last year Sony Ericsson said it would work with Nokia to ensure that its handsets were compatible with the Nokia definition of DVB-H. What it didn’t re-iterate at the time was that these handsets are likely to be market ready for both DVB-H and multicasting, with their own software stack so that consumers would have no idea of where their video was coming from, a key design aim of a blended multi-sourced service. Already KDDI is experimenting with a BCMCS system and PCCW uses the pre-cursor to MBMS ‘ Cell Broadcast Service ‘ to send out two TV channels.
In Australia, 3 has also referred to the ability for consumers to interact with programs. We wrote last week about InLive, a start up which is attacking this market for any form of TV, using cellular services, but in December Ericsson launched its own system of fast unicast TV channel change and conducted trials of mobile TV interaction with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, which allowed mobile phone users to vote, chat and communicate with a television presenter while watching a show. This is built into a downloadable handset client
The 3 Australia technical MBMS trial was held in its Sydney Head office over 6 weeks and run by Ericsson using four specially designed prototype handsets, Ericsson also installed equipment to simulate the content and broadcast servers on a section of 3’s network so the customer and network experience could be seen.
Although 3 Australia has not yet said how many TV channels it managed in this set up, rival IP Wireless, uses MBMS and its own TDD transmitters plugged into base stations using the 5 MHz of existing un-used TDD data spectrum allocated in most 3G licenses, to offer a similar system called TDtv. This system managed to fit 1Mbps for each MHz, and with 5 Mbps has successfully shown 15 QVGA TV channels, so we would expect something similar from Ericsson’s system.
The truth is that 3 is happy to be a guinea pig for anything that might attract customers. It launched late around the world and did not have an existing customer base in GSM to rely on to shift to its 3G service, so has had to find ways to drag customers to its services in the UK, across Europe and in Australia. It will almost certainly be the first to bring this to market, as it was the first to build a DVB-H network in Italy in 2006, when everyone else was just talking about it. Expect Italy to be the first place to see a blended MBMS DVB-H service once final handset designs are ready for MBMS, which should be in early 2008.
Elsewhere in Europe as early as last October the IP Wireless TDtv system was been demonstrated using a MobiTV software stack on the handset, in the UK, where it was backed by all the leading operators there, 3, Orange, Telefonica, and Vodafone, which is where the 15 TV channels were demonstrated. This means that 3 has now seen both systems working, and runs its own DVB-H network in Italy and if offering systems design help to other operators around the world to build out mobile TV networks.