It was never any surprise that Norway was going to be yet another country that would ignore the European Commission edict to use DVB-H technology for mobile TV, and go with its long established favorite T-DMB. After all Norway, not being in the European Union is free to select its own mobile TV technology, and has been using this technology on trial for over 3 years.
Back in 2005 trials began for T-DMB, a technology which is based on the Digital Audio Broadcasting standard with the addition of the H.264 video codec, in Korea, Finland, Italy, France, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain China and Taiwan, and a similar technology called DAB-IP was also used in the UK. However the only services which have come out of these trials have come where instead of trying to harness an existing radio multiplex and launch mobile TV for virtually nothing, a number of new adjacent multiplexes were built from the ground up.
Existing multiplexes only use about 1.5 MHz of spectrum, in a number of bands including Band III (174MHz to 216MHz) and L-Band (DAB is specifically in 1.4 GHz to 14.9 GHz). But in terms of efficiency the protocol is almost as good as DVB-H, except that it uses around double the battery power under current designs.
This means that only a few channels can be built on an existing multiplex, which were always designed for radio services. In Korea a T-DMB service was built using 4 or 5 contiguous slices of DAB spectrum, making it perform to much the same standard as DVB-H (which normally sits in an 8MHz slice of UHF spectrum).
The UK experiment was run by BT and sold by Virgin and lasted barely 6 months, while a German service was launched and managed to find around 3,000 customers and is still lingering. In Italy TV broadcaster RAI experimented with T-DMB and decided in the end not to go with it.
Finland, France and the Netherlands opted for DVB-H, Spain is planning a delayed DVB-H network, while China invented its own technology and Taiwan has still to make up its mind on Mobile TV, and may choose several standards, none of them T-DMB. All of which leaves just Norway (and Korea) opting for T-DMB.
The three biggest broadcasters in Norway, NRK, TV 2 and MTG announced this week the joint formation of a company to launch mobile TV via DMB by the winter. It is almost the same consortia that in 2002 agreed to launched DVB-T services in the country as Norges Television.
The group says that it made the T-DMB choice due to it being cheaper which almost invariable means that it will use an existing DAB multiplex of transmitters. Usually this would mean that the service would offer too few channels at too low a quality and like all the others it will fail. But the service is expected to cope with nine TV channels, though no video quality figures have been given.
Norway has a population of just 4.6 million people and is more than 100% saturated with mobile handsets.
The new company that will be formed to offer T-DMB, Norsk mobil-TV will find it fairly easy to source T-DMB handsets, because it can import them directly from Korea, which means Samsung and LG are likely to get the Lion’s share of business. Broadcasts will start in Oslo and spread out from there, and are set to be free to air, and not a paid service.