It looks like France is going to get a broadcast mobile TV service after all, way ahead of the UK, and it will likely come from Virgin Mobile France, which runs as a virtual network over the Orange infrastructure, much as it does over T-Mobile in the UK.
For a long time, French broadcast operator T’l’diffusion de France, widely known as TDF, has been arguing with the French regulator the CSA, over building a DVB-H network in France ‘ TDF wanted to build it to reach only Paris and a few others cities, though it was happy to pay for the build out. The CSA has said that at least 30% of the population must be reached with any network it builds or it will not release the spectrum.
Finally a deal has been cut, and the release suggests that it will cover more like 50% of French outdoor locations but the exact number that the CSA was after, around 30%, if you count signals that will reach phones indoors.
The big difference between DVB-H and many other mobile TV technologies is that it uses one piece of spectrum to reach many mobile phones in a single broadcast, rather than each phone using a piece of cellular spectrum to get its own selection of TV programs. A DVB-H network has already been specified in France by the government, with about 16 TV channels on it. We think the government must have been mad to pre-specify the channels, and Orange in particular has been scathing about this and said it will never work with those particular channels. However it might come around if it can use DVB-H to distribute the soccer rights that it has recently acquired.
TDF has built mobile TV networks in Finland and Germany and has broadcasting towers all over Europe, and has been an ardent believer in DVB-H technology. Orange currently sends 63 TV channels over its cellular network using cellular streaming, but says that this is clogging up its 3G network and has had to put in special software at each base station to ensure that phone calls are not blocked by people watching TV using the same radio spectrum. So while Orange is not keen on the terms offered in the past by French broadcasters, this Virgin deal may force its hand.
TDF will begin building the network now and the service will be launched in the second half of 2011, and Virgin will have a 6 month period of exclusivity. TDF will pick up all the costs and a charge will be made to Virgin for each subscriber per month.
Virgin in the UK, before it was part of Virgin Media (the Quad play group built around NTL the cable TV company), put out its own mobile TV service but used a radio technology that could only offer 5 channels with very limited video quality. The DVB-H technology is far better and is anyway quite mature.
Most versions of the story, talk about the rights going to Omer Telecom, which says that it now owns Virgin Mobile France. However as far as we can see it is still partly owned by both the Virgin Group and Carphone Warehouse, with a small holding (5%) held by CEO Geoffroy Roux de Bezieux, who has said that he wants to buy the company out. It could be that a deal with Virgin to buy more shares may have happened at the same time as the mobile TV deal was negotiated.
Now TDF has to reach commercial terms with the government selected broadcasters, but this should be no problem since it works with them all the time. Virgin says that it will not directly charge for a subscription but will bundle the TV service into slightly more expensive service bundles.