The tone at NAB a few weeks back over the ATSC Mobile Handheld standard was that it didn’t matter which of the two coalitions won ‘ whether the MPH offering from LG and its US subsidiary Zenith with its broadcasting partner Harris or the Samsung, Rohde and Schwarz, Nokia Siemens Networks backed A-VSB effort.
Both companies were in a position to cover a win by the other camp, with Harris President Tim Thorsteinson telling us that it would take only 90 days to adjust his product line to accommodate a defeat in the selection process.
Now it really doesn’t matter as Samsung and LG have agreed between them to merge the two efforts. The two systems were undergoing tests by the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) which was to make results available to the working group at ATSC that would decide upon the standard. With these two merging and a third effort from Thomson not invited to try out, that means that all of the players are working towards an agreed standard.
Chances are this won’t make it happen sooner, nor will it change the likely winners in business terms, but it may accelerate uptake, eliminating confusion between the two standards sooner, and getting local broadcasters across the US on the same page.
There are however some issues to clear up. It was only the two Korean companies, Samsung and LG that have agreed to merge the two standards, and while they were based on their technology submissions, both of them variants on the 8 VSB modulation that underlies the ATSC broadcasting. Harris Corporation was quick off the mark to endorse the new merged standard, and has already come out and said that it will introduce a system based on this new merged standard in November 2008. It will ship its new Apex digital exciter in August and field upgrade it in November, which it says supports the management and service elements of most mobile DTV standards, including OMA BCAST.
We have yet to hear from the other Samsung partners, Rohde and Schwarz and Nokia Siemens. It looks like the upper level software layers may be those proposed by Nokia, which will make it marginally easier to put ATSC M/H services on the same device that runs DVB-H services. Qualcomm had also proposed its own service layers which would make it easier to use ATSC M/H with MediaFLO on the same device, but the wording from the Harris statement seems to suggest that both can work with the new standard.
At a signing ceremony Samsung and LG agreed to cooperate in order to assure rapid adoption by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) of a single common in-band mobile DTV standard and said that the technology for the jointly proposed system will reflect the findings of the IDOV (Independent Demonstration of Viability) conducted by the Association of Maximum Service Television (MSTV) on behalf of the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC). That’s shorthand for saying that whatever technical features worked best in the trials would be adapted for the final system.
The entire US broadcasting ecosystem is moving at breakneck speed to have these systems deployed and ready to roll by the time new digital TV slots are in place in the US, and analog TV is switched off, next February.
Like ISDB-T, the ATSC M/H creates a single digital channel of 19.4 Mbps for each 6 MHz of spectrum, which can be carved up to offer HD, SD and multiple Mobile TV versions of either the same channel or different channels, all concurrently from the same transmitters.
The National Association of Broadcasters reckons that this will lead to 130 million free to air handsets and 25 million portable receivers being shipped by 2012. That could only happen if the two major cellular players AT&T and Verizon, currently appearing to be committed to MediaFLO, were to subsidize devices which had the ATSC M/H chipsets in them. It would mean a 60% penetration of mobile phone owners in the US and be an unprecedented uptake of a new mobiles technology. Our own take is that around 70% of mobile TV services will be based on free to air ATSC services, but that multiple proprietary pay TV services, such as MediaFLO would also emerge in a market that will reach just 44 million devices by 2012, still substantial but way under the numbers that NAB is hoping for.
Either way there is the entire US national broadcast network to upgrade, and Harris looks set fair to take a substantial and leading market share in it.