Mobile TV commentators everywhere see the technology and business model as questionable, and the Mobile World Congress was no different, with most of the Mobile TV news slightly downbeat. But among all the slightly negative messages you can detect an undercurrent of inevitability about video on the handset, both broadcast and unicast. It is coming, and although this is not soon in many countries, it cannot be stopped.
In a way we disagree and always have. If high bandwidth internet delivery comes first, and if internet options continue to emerge where streaming systems measure and deliver only the bandwidth that the system can handle, then eventually wireless video will be flexible enough so that internet delivered content will take over from mobile TV. To us the clock is ticking, especially with this event showing that LTE is in such a hurry now, which is why mobile TV efforts here are so key.
IP Wireless is one supplier that has always offered some hope using, as it does, the tiny 5 MHz segments of unpaired spectrum within 3G allocations, harnessing them with TDD transmitters, and creating a video carrier using its TDtv system.
This is analogous to building a new network, but it is one where existing cellular towers, about one in 3 of them, need an extra transmitter and each handset needs a new chip ‘ not too different you might say from the DVB-H or more likely the DVB-SH system which is already available. But there are important differences ‘ the spectrum is already there, lying around unused; the towers are already there, in the right place, and the entire show is under the control of a cellular operator, so that broadcast towers are not required.
This system has been damaged by the fact that IP Wireless has sometimes appeared not to have a future, attached as it was to Nextwave, the parent company that bought it a few years ago. Since then Nextwave’s fortunes have faded, and IP Wireless has recently gone out on its own again, with private funding.
The company’s existing revenues comes from using the same TDD spectrum in a two way set up to offer broadband services, with one major installation in the Czech Republic, and its only hope for a Mobile TV service based on similar but one way technology, is in the UK, where Orange and T-Mobile have shared their two slices of 5 MHz of unpaired spectrum, to create a single 10 MHz, 28 Channel TV system, at present just to a large part of West London in a trial.
Speaking to them at the show, the company points at rival data only broadcast offerings pushed by Ericsson using an FDD signal. But it now transpires that at the March Plenary session of the 3GPP this is all set to change, and a new standard which takes in both approaches will be ratified under the name Integrated Mobile Broadcast (iMB).
IP Wireless sees this as the starting gun to trigger the use of unpaired spectrum and existing MBMS multicast capabilities in base station software, and says the dispute is the reason that MBMS has been so quiet for the past year. With a single standard in place the major equipment suppliers such as Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Siemens Networks and Alcatel may all wish to enter the hardware and general systems market for unpaired spectrum and IP Wireless then hopes to find licensees among them for its software and chipset designs.
Today its transmitter remains at around $10,000 per base station, and when two operators merge their unpaired spectrum efforts they only have to pay for one transmitter for each of three base stations, so where they have separate networks covering the same space, they only each have to pay to upgrade around one sixth of their own base stations. The new iMB system will support 15 TV channels for one unpaired 5MHz license and 30 channels if two operators lump theirs together, as Orange and T-Mobile have in the UK. IP Wireless remains hopeful that 4 customers will sign up for its technology by 2010 but will not name its advanced prospects.
US streaming mobile TV specialist MobiTV announced at the show that it had just passed the 6 million mark for paying subscribers to its streamed TV services, and had more to say about the coming ATSC M/H standard, expected to shake up the US market in Mobile TV.
CTO Kay Johansson said ‘We have been driving the standard on ATSC M/H for media delivery. It is an RTP multicast, and has no MPEG 2 transports, so it is more natively packet based and the design is straightforward.
‘People talk with DVB-H about bypassing the carrier, but interactivity is a key element of mobile TV, which is why I believe that ATSC M/H cannot bypass the carrier.’ If he’s right then either AT&T or Verizon or both will have to sign up for the system during 2009 in order for it to take off, so watch out for that. MobiTV is instrumental here and already supports two of the top three cellcos in the US with streaming. If that same supplier brings them a better system, for minimal costs, then they may well listen.
‘We don’t believe that the handset vendors will charge any more for an ATSC M/H handset than for a similar device without an ATSC M/H chip,’ Johansson told us, and this tallies with our own logic. The two leaders in the handset chain in ATSC M/H are LG and Samsung, both thriving in the US and both keen to continue to eat what’s left of Motorola’s declining business. These can pay for their investment in ATSC M/H technology out of a growing market share and nothing else.
Johansson outlined his vision for interactivity on ATSC handsets, ‘We can already make it so that local information can be added to a broadcast advert, this will plant links to local dealers for instance, which can be reached using the cellular back channel. This will allow a local element to a national advertising program. But if the wireless carriers don’t want to put this into devices, then it can’t happen.’
There is an important idea circulating US mobile markets which says that ATSC M/H cannot be used for paid TV services because the spectrum has been given to those companies on the basis that they bring free TV to the world, supported by advertising. And advertising which simply goes cellular, but does nothing new and will not provide sufficient upside to broadcasters there, where they are widely understood to be suffering in the current recession. Interactive and addressable advertising will need to be in place to drive premium ad values.
‘By mid-2010 interactive protocols will be in place for voting and interactive advertising,’ said Johansson and touted its own Optimized Delivery Server (ODS) technology as a winner here, which will be able to offer links to stocks, to VoD clips, where it uses spoken text and programming metadata in the video to serve interactive elements. This system was launched on the AT&T network in the US in December and will therefore be widely understood by cellcos by the time ATSC M/H is in play late this year, early next.
Separately at the show MobiTV announced that it can deliver live video content to the iPhone, as a stream, but pointed out that as yet it has no deal with Apple to allow this in the wild as a product. Clearly it anticipates that this permission will be forthcoming. The company said, ‘We are streaming live video to the iPhone over 2G, 3G, and wi-fi connections using MobiTV media playback engine. Once again the iPhone screen and customer base proves to be an ideal platform for watching TV even if Apple has no part in its introduction.
Already Siano at the show was showing off its mobile dongle now on sale in Japan, a system which feeds 1-seg TV to the iPhone, while PacketVideo and Nagravision were showing their iPhone DVB-H dongle which is being prepared for an as yet unnamed player in Europe.
Given that Apple has allowed this in Japan, it is unlikely that it will deny AT&T, its first benefactor, even though this is a different kind of video ‘ streamed. MobiTV already supports some 350 mobile devices in the same way and says that this system is backed by its ODS stream server and it includes immediate session start and fast channel change, features that it refuses to explain to anyone given that it involves patent pending intellectual property.
Meanwhile one of the key decisions in the success or otherwise of Mobile TV in Europe will be whether or not one of the major countries adds its weight to 3 Italia’s efforts in DVB-H. The UK is out of the question for spectrum reasons right now, France is tied up in a dispute over business models that may or may not have been broken by TDF’s recent offer to bear the brunt of the build out costs if the regulator will drop the initial build out requirement from 30% to 15% of the country. But even optimistic followers see this as bringing mobile TV to the country no sooner than mid-2010.
Spain still has to pass laws and allocate spectrum, so will also only just hit a mid-2010 deadline if it moves now, which leaves Germany.
Germany has a ready made broadcast network built in 4 cities lying fallow, and most operators are now offering DVB-T devices to pick up the existing terrestrial signal instead. This was done just to block the advances of Mobile 3.0, the previous owner of the DVB-H network, which handed back the license to the regulator at the end of last year having failed to gain the cellular operator’s attention. If no-one bids for this spectrum license and offers to take those transmitter networks off the hands of bankrupt Mobile 3.0, then the country will be left to DVB-T. However although this signal runs in 16QAM encoding, and penetrates some widows and walls due to the way the DVB-T network was built, mostly to reach into car seat backs, it is still insufficient for real widespread use. It also burns batteries rapidly.
The word at the show, from several sources is that the regulator has managed to interest at least two of the major cellcos there, and of course Media Broadcast, now owned by TDF, which built the network for Mobile 3.0 will also be very keen to oil any potential deal. The would leave TDF a role in France, Germany and Finland in European DVB-H.
If this system comes alive it needs only a financial transaction to happen to turn on four cities, followed by completion of build out in probably as many as 10 more. So Germany could have a semi-nationwide network before the end of 2009 and if our money had to go on anyone this would be a triumvirate of Vodafone, T-Mobile and TDF. If that happens it will be interesting to see if the service will be offered to other cellcos as well. We suspect not or else why do it..
Finally Alcatel’s nascent mobile TV standard, DVB-SH, made perhaps the smallest of marks at the show announcing that its first trial is over which has been running since December 2007 with 3 Italia and Italian public service broadcaster RAI in Italy. DVB-SH is a hybrid satellite terrestrial system using both transmission sources in a single frequency network.
DVB-SH is similar in every respect to DVB-H, including the upper layers of handset software. It uses an OFDM spectrum scheme, with the same modulation types, the same time and frequency interleaving, and although it uses a slightly more advanced forward error correction protection the rest is the same, the DVB IP Datacast structure and electronic service guide and digital rights management standards.
However it transmits in Europe in S-Band, or satellite band, which is being auctioned now across Europe in two slices of 30 MHz each from 1980 to 2010 and from 2170 to 2200.
Just why the world’s most successful DVB-H operator, 3 Italia, would want to get involved with a different mobile TV standard is something of a mystery.
All that Alcatel managed to say about the trial is that it has shown excellent results demonstrating high reception performances on commercial terminals.
The trial took place in Turin and the statement said that it achieved outdoor, vehicular and indoor coverage. But it still never used a satellite and now it plans in March to go into another phase using the freshly launched Eutelsat W2A satellite, the satellite with which Solaris Mobile, the joint venture between Eutelsat and SES Astra, will bid for the European license. The system will target existing trialists and in-car devices.
If Solaris wins one of the two licenses, suddenly DVB-SH will come back into the Mobile TV frame aggressively in Europe.
Newport Media the US start up which is attacking this market and which so far has DVB-T, DVB-H, ISDB-T and MediaFLO chips, said it now has a 65nm CMOS single-chip solution for China’s CMMB called the NMI500 Sundance C mobile digital TV receiver. It comes with integrated RF tuner, demodulator and all required memory in a single monolithic CMOS device for which it claims the worlds lowest power consumption packaged in a fine pitch plastic ball grid array (FBGA). Volume is scheduled for the third quarter of 2009, so finally someone other than Siano has been attracted to the exploding Chinese market. However by then it will have to disrupt an existing and aggressively accelerating device eco-system.
Finally, despite the negative attentions of the European Commission, which has pushed DVB-H in Europe as its main mobile TV technology, ETSI has approved the air interface for FLO Mobile Broadcast Technology, the technology behind MediaFLO. The UK, where FLO designer Qualcomm has bought some L-Band spectrum, remains the only, rather forlorn, hope that MediaFLO will find any purchase in Europe.