Germany has found a solution to the impasse that has seen its DVB-H mobile TV service stuck with no sales and few future prospects. The licensing authority has asked for the license back from Mobile 3.0, and has threatened to withdraw it, if it fails to comply.
This will complete a coup by the local cellular operators led by T-Mobile and Vodafone, who have said they would boycott any sales of DVB-H and instead have provide their own DVB-T capable handsets. DVB-T was never designed for delivery to a handset, but the peculiar conditions of the DVB-T network in Germany means that handsets get decent pictures most of the time when using DVB-T enabled devices.
Various reports cite Thomas Langheinrich, chairman of the media authorities’ licensing and supervision committee, saying that after a recent meeting it was decided to ask for the license back or begin revocation procedures.
Mobile 3.0 has the Germany DVB-H license and is owned by South African media conglomerate Naspers, through its subsidiary Mobiles Fernsehen Deutschland (MFD) in a joint venture with publishing houses Burda and Holtzbrinck. It is said to have failed to understand what was required of it, in terms of both building out the DVB-H transmitter network, as well as with building sales relationships with the operators or other ‘marketing partners.’ Other reasons given was that now content was lined up for non-linear content delivery, by which we assume they mean clipcast services, push VoD and interaction.
The German authorities would then issue a ten year license to replace the three year one that Mobile 3.0 has. However it is not clear if there will be any opportunity for Mobile 3.0 to recoup some of its costs, by selling off the network it has built so far, or if the collective mobile operators still wish to ‘invest’ in mobile TV at all, given that they have begun the DVB-T initiative.
Mobile 3.0 has only built out DVB-H transmitters in 4 cities ‘ Hamburg, Hanover, Frankfurt and Munich and there are reports that Mobile 3.0 is on the verge of folding, with its parents talking openly during August about pulling all future funding.
Meanwhile Qatar Telecom (Qtel) and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) has signed a commercial mobile TV deployment contract for a DVB-H network using the OMA BCAST smart card profile with Nokia providing N96 handsets.