The wireless community sets so much store in what used to be the 3GSM show, now sold off and renamed the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, that there are few announcements made in the weeks before and after, and in our world of digital media the MWC is a key indicator of how well cellular and other wireless technologies are embracing video services.
So unashamedly we are devoting much of this week’s issue to the themes that have emerged from that show ‘ namely service integration, new mobile TV and mobile internet chips and both new devices and services which touch location, broadband and rich media.
Perhaps the most interesting of all to a Faultline audience is the way in which the mobile TV world is rapidly catching up with and emulating the world of IPTV ‘ where initially there were service elements and trials made up of five, six or seven vendors, coming together around some rushed together standards and dealing with the integration problems on the fly. For IPTV we have had five painful years where browsers, multicasts, set tops, EPG, conditional access, middleware and encoding were all mashed together ‘ eating much of the profit from any given installation on the integration costs.
For mobile TV those same elements ‘ encoding, conditional access (DRM), datacast structure, radio tuner, demodulating chip, codec chip, handset software stack, are all in the throes of finding their partners. And like IPTV, where there emerged one stop shops ‘ Microsoft and Alcatel, and what is now Nokia Siemens Networks with its Surpass, Myrio, Verimatrix combinations ‘ so too are there companies trying to do it all in Mobile TV, as well as clusters of point products trying to deal with the integration issues up front, so they don’t fall into the traps that beleaguered IPTV.
Thomson Grass Valley is a company that can do most things, but it doesn’t have its own DRM; Nokia is a company that can offer a system end to end, but went to Envivio for encoders; Microsoft has yet to make its move, while Texas Instruments wants to accommodate every type of Mobile TV on its applications processor and its DLP (see separate story on devices).
NDS is one of the companies, strong in IPTV, that to date has had virtually no presence in the world of mobile TV. Sure it has its mVideoGuard product, but it has no significant customers for this, whereas rivals Irdeto and Nagravision have wins at S-DMB in Korea and within the various DVB-H service launches in Italy and Africa.
Last Summer NDS actually won the technical decision among a group of broadcasters in Korea, for putting conditional access on the free to air public T-DMB services, to extend them into a paid and protected service dimension. But the decision stumbled over the acceptance of the NDS technology by the cellular operators and what might have been the biggest Mobile TV security contract died from lack of across the board agreement.
So on the back of not completing that T-DMB contract, NDS has rethought its mobile TV strategy, and its announcements at the show ‘ integration with UDcast IP encapsulators, integration with EXPway’s ESG server and handset client and integration using both of the most common security standards, OMA BCAST Smart Card Profile and DVB-H OSF with a Thomson SmartVision service platform using Gemalto smart cards and an LG handset’ all reflect a new approach.
And in that new strategy NDS has sensed, as we have at Faultline, that’s as a stand alone service Mobile TV is unlikely to provide enough money for cellular operators to turn it into a profit center in its own right. It can be launched to reduce churn, or in partnership with a broadcaster that picks up most of the costs.
Roy Isacowitz Mobile TV Marketing manager for NDS walked us through the transition, ‘We are skeptical of the commercial viability of stand alone mobile TV. It can’t be free to air, because people watch it 16 to 25 minutes a day and that’s just not enough advertising, and it can’t be a subscription only service with enough money coming in to make a cellular operator a decent amount of money. And that means that NDS can’t make money on it.
‘So our approach has been to treat it as one element of a larger TV and video experience, and to target those converged operators that are looking to use it alongside existing broadcast services to offer a cross platform system.’
Isacowitz suggests that many of NDS’ traditional customer base ‘ satellite, cable and IPTV pay TV operators ‘ are looking at simply embracing a new mobile dimension ‘ and is offering what it calls a unified head end which it showed at CES for the first time.
‘To start with we have had to look at new data models. In the old world of pay TV we had a subscription and that belonged to a household and that had one or more services. Now we have had to add concepts like ‘device’ and ‘domain’ and introduce a data model that can work with multiple subscribers in a single domain, attached to one or more households, on multiple devices and device types each consuming multiple services.’
So NDS has just completed a re-write of its core software which has taken the best part of two years, through which it can manage subscription transactions, pay per view, loyalty schemes and content recommendation across multiple platforms. All of this drives from its security server at the head end of a service, and that can now support the two key security standards for DVB-H mobile TV, OMA BCAST SCP and the DVB Open Framework concurrently.
So while many suppliers have been demonstrating one or the other of these and claiming to be the first to support BCAST SCP, NDS has gone one better and demonstrated at the show both working from the same server across the Abertis mobile TV demo, supporting security on two different devices (one from Gigabyte and the other an LG handset) with two different security stacks.
Later NDS wants to broaden this to take in MBMS, and potentially the US ATSC M/H standard and singles out Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, Bharti and Telmex as the type of organization that it believes it can target where they each have ambitions in the fixed line space and need access to multi-tier mobile TV services using more than one technology, as well as its traditional broadcasting customers many of which sit within the News Corp organization.
Interestingly the deal with UDcast was cut by its new CEO Jas Saini and its head of business development David Richardson, who both joined UDcast in May from NDS. It’s not too surprising then that given a strategy for UDcast, which has supplied the IP Encapsulator at 70% of the DVB-H trials around the world, to get as many technology integrations as possible with different suppliers in the mobile TV eco-system, that one of the first they should line up is NDS.
Irdeto has similarly targeted a number of integrations for the show and is demonstrating an OMA BCAST system, working with devices from LG Electronics, and integration with the handset software stack of Silicon and Software Systems (S3) and SIDSA’s head end.
This combination sits virtually opposite the one that NDS has come up with and despite Italian SIDSA, which has had success mostly in Russian DVB-H implementations, trying to build, design, and implement a DVB-H system from end to end, it is now finding itself specializing and licensing its DVB-H chip intellectual property to other manufacturers. The SIDSA head end handles subscription management, purchase, network planning, network management and monitoring, and includes the provision of transmitters and gap fillers and a kind of femto gap filler for indoor usage.
The great bulk of DVB-H specifications are coming out now with BCAST specified and therefore rely on the BCAST Smart Card Profile, but just in case S3 joined Irdeto to offer a system which allows handset manufacturers to support both OSF and BCAST in a single system, pretty much the same as NDS has just delivered.
The combined system was developed between S3 and Irdeto and has been through a variety of interoperability tests, including the Broadcast Mobile Convergence Forum (BMCO) Test Camp last summer in Berlin using S3’s onHandTV client which integrates Irdeto’s OSF and BCAST security components. Irdeto’s system supports subscription models like pay-per-view (PPV), pay-per-time (PPT) and recorded content.
Irdeto also said that it has been chosen for Latvia’s first mobile TV trial with Latvijas Mobilais Telefons the tiny country’s largest mobile network operator. The trial was launched in November and covers Riga and just goes to 500 trial devices offering the four public TV channels.
Also at the show UDcast is one of the first companies to address what the WiMAX contingent has been talking about for years, but doing nothing to deliver, which is a triple play, including mobile TV, on a WiMAX platform.
The problem with a WiMAX base station sending video as it stands, is that it will send it in a constant quality of service managed stream, and won’t package it into time slices. It can either implement MBS (Multicast-Broadcast Service) which is the multicasting system built into the 802.16e standard, or simply use IGMP (internet group management protocol), but either way that’s going to lead to a strain on battery life. The UDcast system offers an overall TV manager, which can look after the management of TV not only over WiMAX, but other networks, such as another cellular network, or a datacast system such as DVB-H or DVB-SH where a service is multi-network. It also does the job of the Multicast-Broadcast Service Controller synchronizing base stations for SFN (Single Frequency Network) operation, and dropping in Forward Error Correction, and handling hand-over between base stations. And a Base Station module can look after the process of changing content at each local base station, for instance putting in localized adverts, something that UDcast has been preaching for some time.
The new generation of WiMAX operators, although perhaps not the cellular operators that are using it for parallel data delivery networks, are likely to take a keen interest in something like this, given the fact that their networks are new and they will need new services to attract customers.
And if UDcast needs a company that can delivery conditional access or DRM on a WiMAX network, it need look no further than its new partner NDS, given that it has had such a system operational and waiting for someone to begin delivering video over a WiMAX network, for the past 18 months.