The shape of India’s potentially vast mobile TV market is on the verge of take off, with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) recommending an open bidding process for both satellite and terrestrial spectrum dedicated to mobile TV, meaning that auctions are likely to take place this year and that anyone can bid.
TRAI has also taken the step of allowing up to 74% of any bidder to be owned by interests outside of India, in order to attract overseas operators and investors. This is in keeping with India’s recent strategy on 3G, WiMAX and other wireless auctions.
The move to include some S-Band spectrum will almost certainly mean that Alcatel, highly favored in India, will get an opportunity to push its own DVB-SH technology, and gain it an immense national footprint to go with those it is planning in both Europe and the US.
TRAI also made the point that these new licenses will be for newcomers and that plenty of other existing Telecom Operators and Cellcos already have sufficient spectrum to launch their own mobile TV services. The licenses will be technology neutral except that they should use standards put forward under the ITU, so that might mean anything from T-DMB and DVB-H and DVB-SH, but not Qualcomm’s MediaFLO.
TRAI said that apart from Doordarshan, private operators may be assigned at least one slot of 8 MHz each for mobile TV operation using terrestrial systems. For satellite based systems also, apart from Doordarshan, private operators may be allocated spectrum such that a bandwidth of at least 8 MHz is available to them for mobile television services. Sharing the terrestrial transmission infrastructure of Doordarshan should be permitted on a mutual agreement basis, TRAI also said.
This move seems to have speeded up India’s public broadcaster Doordarshan, which has had a DVB-H trial in progress in Delhi since 2006 using NEC transmitters and Nokia handsets. Doordarshan has rolled out a full head end for Delhi which went live, during 2007 and will now begin bringing Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata online before these new licenses can be auctioned and made productive.
The Tata Group also began mobile TV trials in New Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta last year, but that was using its own T-DMB multiplex from Pixtree with just 3 or 4 video channels, with handsets from Samsung, LG and Perstel in partnership with cellco Bharti Airtel.
Once the new licenses are also added, that means that by the end of 2008 there could be at least 4 separate mobile TV services in India, in all the major centers of population plus the big S-Band satellite footprint. However none of this will take off without exceptionally cheap DVB-H and DVB-SH devices coming to market, and potentially laptop cards will do more business than actual handsets.
India currently has around 166 million cellular handset owners, growing at around 24% a year, and is likely to be offering all of these services as either free to air, or some channels free, plus some paid. Potentially India could rival the uptake in Japan which has 18.5 million mobile TV users, and keep pace with China, which is expected to eventually become one of the world’s biggest mobile TV markets.