After three years of interminable mobile TV trials and false dawns, Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populated country with 245 million inhabitants, will finally get not one, but two mobile TV services this year, both of them using DVB-H.
The news comes courtesy of the Jakarta Globe, which talks about two of the country’s biggest telecommunications companies, PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia and PT Indosat being behind the two deals.
But the prime mover in one of the deals appears to be Global Mediacom which set up its first trial with Nokia Siemens Networks in 2008. It has partnered with PT Indosat to drive one of the services, while PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia is the incumbent part government owned telco.
A previous trial was run by a company called EMTEK (Elang Mahkota Teknologi) in 2006 running 20 channels of video and may well have been absorbed into the PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia bid.
Back in April Global Mediacom made it clear that it was working with Nokia Siemens Networks and that its subsidiary, Tren Mobile TV would get one of the two licenses. Global Mediacom is a thriving media business, understood to be controlled by members of the Suharto family, the deposed Indonesian military dictator and is in the process of upgrading transmitters from 500 Watts up to 3 KiloWatts in Central Jakarta.
Jakarta or more precisely the wider area of Jabodetabek area of Indonesia is its largest metropolitan area, which has a population of around 24 million (around 10% of the county’s population). It is one of the ten largest concentrations of people in the world. Jabodetabek consists of Jakarta along with Bekasi, Bogor in West Java and Tangerang in Banten and this is where all of the first transmitters will go up.
For Nokia Siemens this Global Mediacom deal has been an agonizingly long coming to market and getting the government blessing. We suspect that Nokia funded much of the early network. At the time Nokia said it was its biggest ever mobile TV contract.
TV channels have been mandated as ‘free to air’ and on the Tren service include RCTI, TPI, Global TV, and Infokom. Tren Mobile TV is a consortium formed by MNC group, RCTI, TPI, Globaltv, and Indovision ‘ all of which are subsidiaries of Global Mediacom ‘ with Indosat as its strategic partner. The Tren network should be in place in Greater Jakarta by mid-August
It is likely that Nokia will provide top end smart phones (once again too high end for most of the population which will slow down uptake), but one mystery device referred to as the DHD-250 H has been mentioned in the press and this may be a cheap DVB-H device (if it was, half the world would want one).
The Philippines did much the same thing, ran two parallel trials and then launched two separate DVB-H mobile services. However there is little news on whether these were ever really launched, or just announced and have little or no uptake, but they were paid for services.
Indonesia has a handset penetration of just under 40% making it a 100 million handset market, but given the wide geographic spread of the population and the reach of these particular services, it probably means that only 10 million people are candidates for a DVB-H phone. However video is very popular in Indonesia, even gimmicky video ringtones, so it is expected to gain a high degree of penetration, just as soon as cheap DVB-H phones are on the market, something that LG, Samsung and ZTE are sure to see to in short order if Nokia fails to.
Indonesian TV has around 11 national TV networks at last count and they each have local transmitter sites which can be used for DVB-H build out.
The other consortium is based on two Telkom subsidiaries, the country’s biggest cellular provider, PT Telkomsel, and its pay TV operator, Telkomvision, and these will push a package of eight channels, including CNN and National Geographic and be up later in the year.