Looking at the machinations in Africa on Mobile TV it’s like watching the entire last five years of global mobile progress, if you can call it that, happen all over again. This week the Mobile TV consortium, which says it will come to market next year with a service called TV4U, has finally begun trials of a rival technology, T-DMB, instead of the established technology chosen by regulator ICASA in DVB-H.
Mobile TV is a black-owned business which tried to bid for the South African DVB-H license, and when it failed to qualify, because it had not previously run a broadcasting business, it tried to sue the regulator, in this case unsuccessfully. Subsequently it used this pressure on the regulator to get an experimental license for T-DMB and its quest for a full license is likely to be successful sometime in 2011.
T-DMB is a rival technology, built around the European Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) radio standard by the simple expedient of adding a video codec H.264, to exiting music multiplexes. So far that strategy is a universal failure and has been so for the past five years. It was tried in Germany and the UK and was unceremoniously dumped after almost non-existent sales. None of the other trials around the world have led to services except in South Korea. Video quality is low when it is tried in an existing audio radio multiplex, but like any technology, when it is used in brand new allocated spectrum, it can work.
The problem is that DAB expects to work in 1.5 MHz slices of spectrum, because it was designed for audio only. Where more spectrum is allocated, such as in South Korea, where multiple contiguous slices of the spectrum were made available, there are multiplexor benefits and denser data streams can be offered. In South Korea there are 20 million or more devices which can pick up T-DMB TV signals in a population of around 48 million, over a 40% penetration.
The new African trial went live with MobileTV South African Broadcasting channels SABC1 and SABC2, and the South African Broadcasting Corporation is seen very much as the right partner for MobileTV because it has DAB spectrum and transmitter capability in place. As we said this has been tried in other countries by incumbent broadcasters and it hasn’t worked out, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t survive in South Africa or broader parts of Africa, where all media and cellular is less advanced and less widespread.
Meanwhile the two major mobile TV licensees, e.TV and DStv, which is owned by dominant DTH satellite TV player Multichoice, have begun broadcasting live in DVB-H last month, staring on November 23.
The rush to bring this service to the nation in time for the Soccer World Cup which it hosted in the Summer, was defeated by the Regulator ICASA failing to allocate the license until 3 weeks before the soccer finals. The attention of the Mobile TV consortium on the bidding process led to Multichoice, the only player who had a three year long operational trial, being banned from selection because the Mobile TV consortium claimed it had missed the bid deadline. It wasn’t until September that Multichoice also got a license and it wouldn’t cut a deal to carry the rival e.TV channels on its transmitters until it could launch its own channels, hence the November launch.
But another part of the delay has been all about devices and pricing. There has been a long discussion internally at DStv over creating a service not only available to the 1% of the population which can afford smart phones. Sure a strategy is needed for smart phones, but cheaper devices needed to come along as well.
In its launch we can see that it now has the ZTE F900, a phone about which there is almost no detail, but which has a conventional numerical keyboard on the front and no touch screen as far as we can see and about a 2.5 inch screen, but which has a DVB-H chip and antenna built in. This will probably go for the equivalent of $100 or perhaps a little more, which will mean it is in the financial reach of around 20% to 30% of mobile owners there.
The rest of the strategy relies on the Nokia N96, the Nokia 5530 (surely this is a mistake and it means the Nokia 5330 which has DVB-H built in) and a device called the Drifta which is a dongle which outputs video across WiFi which comes from Valups in Korea. Valups has done a version of this for T-DMB and for ATSC M/H in the US and this means it can target all iPhones and iPads, as well as PCs and laptops running Windows, with Android phones and tablets to follow shortly. The Drifta costs around $87 in the local Rand currency. Also the Nokia N8 which has DVB-H built in will also be launched later.
The initial Multichoice bouquet will include Africa Magic, Channel O, Trace TV, the eNews Channel, SuperSport Blitz, SuperSport , SuperSport 2, SuperSport 3 and the Cartoon Network with e.TV to introduce more of its own channels shortly.
The service will cost the local equivalent of $5 a month, but will be free until April 2011 and handsets will be shipped on phones from all the major local operators
MTN, Vodacom and Cell C.
However in the long winded wait for broadcast mobile TV, slowly the major city networks of South Africa have moved towards widening 3G coverage and adding a number of phones which have 3G, and the big trigger for shifting customers to 3G has been that it has the bandwidth to allow streamed cellular video, and very similar TV services have already been introduced, usually with some minor data caps (like limits on how long each day a user can watch TV for).
These non-broadcast bouquets are more expensive and likely to be frustrating in that in any given area only a handful of viewers will be allowed to watch at once. But had DVB-H services been launched 3 years ago when Multichoice first showed an interest, it would have had no competition.
Our only concern is that most DVB-T and DVB-T2 territories still have no viable way of delivering broadcast mobile TV to handsets, because unlike ISDB-T and ATSC M/H, the DVB Project has fought shy of actually integrating mobile broadcast TV into its core protocol. Most cellular operators have now decided that DVB-H is too expensive to build out compared to simply adding new digital exciters into the existing TV transmitter mix.
It was part of the specification to have a mobile version integrated into DVB-T2 but was dropped as a requirement halfway through the standard selection process.
This means that now that Southern Africa has settled on DVB-T2 as a digital TV standard, that each country will be faced with building out a totally separate DVB-H platform or waiting until the DVB Project sees the error of its ways and retrospectively integrates mobile broadcast TV into DVB-T2. It did leave room for later standard additions, because political pressure was brought to bear to give DVB-H a chance to get off the ground, before it was effectively replaced. Since then it has comprehensively failed, and so there may soon be a new initiative to integrate something into DVB-T2, however it will most likely be identical to DVB-H but inside the DVB-T2 signal.