The ‘other’ Italian broadcaster, RAI, the one not owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the erstwhile prime minister of Italy, says that it plans to launch a mobile TV service of 3 channels, using T-DMB this Summer.
That kind of move appears suicidal in our view, and will leave the company at a huge disadvantage as it tries to fight of broadcasting rival Mediaset, which has build its own DVB-H network and has as partners the two leading cellular operators in Italy, Telecom Italia and Vodafone Italy, with cellular market shares between them above 80%.
RAI and Mediaset between them combined have around 95% of the analog TV market in Italy with Sky Italia recently grabbing 4.2 million customers with satellite TV, Fastweb taking some 430,000 IPTV customers, a route that Telecom Italia has just embarked on, and 5 million Italian homes have taken DVB-T digital terrestrial services to date. So RAI is beset with all manner of attacks to its dominance, and without any DVB-H appropriate UHF spectrum it says it was forced into the move using T-DMB, a derivative of DAB. The dominant provider of mobile TV in Italy is 3 Italia, which has its own DVB-H network and offers around 16 TV channels.
There will be many broadcasters and operators in Europe in a similar position, and each of them will have to find their own route to market, which is why each of the varied mobile TV technologies will each get a share of the market. However getting cellular operators onboard with devices is likely to be the deciding factor in whether each of them are successful.
Stefano Ciccotti, CEO of RAIWay, the RAI network management company, said the decision was obligatory and that Rai either invests €300 million to build yet another DVB-H network or it could have a T-DMB network for around €8 million.
But elsewhere DAB based approaches have proved to be a false economy, except in Korea where new spectrum was made available, rather than using existing DAB radio multiplexes that are already built. The resulting services are low in resolution, too low to take off, use up battery too fast, are about to be overtaken by a DAB 2.0 standard and in the UK and Germany where they have been launched, have attracted very low numbers.
RAI will team up with digital radio consortia Club DAB, EuroDAB and CR DAB to pool frequencies and launch a combined TV/radio service which will be launched initially in Rome during August.
Up until April 2006 RAI had said that it would work with Vodafone in Italy experimenting on DVB-H, until Vodafone was tempted away by Mediaset’s spectrum holdings to work with Mediaset.