Encoder builder Harmonic was pushing a three screen vision at Mobile World Congress talking about its Prostream 400 transcoder, its Rhozet Carbon coder which makes and stores multi resolution media copies, and showed a catch-up TV demonstration on a smartphone in collaboration with handset ESG specialist firm Expway,
We had always thought that the Austrian DVB-H service was crawling along, but mobile operator 3 Austria says it has 90,000 regular users of its hybrid mobile TV bundle, which users both cellular streaming, combined with DVB-H broadcasts.
Turns out that it is local provider castLabs which has upgraded 3 Italia’s DRM system to include OMA BCAST DRM, in order to allow the Nokia N96 to work with the network there. Previously only the Nagravision OSF system was used, and castLabs says that its system will also support the OMA BCAST smartcard profile solution for unconnected devices. It also provided the DRM for the Austrian DVB-H platform.
Researcher In-Stat says that the global market for pay DTH satellite TV rose significantly in 2008, up 18% in subscription numbers, which makes it sound like it’s a great business to be in, but the bulk of that came because of a rapid acceleration in India where new platforms were launched and widely accepted, reaching around 9 million subscribers at the end of 2008, doubling from the previous year. India now has five pay DTH satellite providers with a sixth expected to enter the market early in 2009. China is also supposed to introduce a pay DTH satellite service in 2009 or 2010. In-stat reckons there will be nearly 200 million DTH pay-TV subscribers worldwide by 2012 with revenues of $143 billion by 2011.