News this week that Qualcomm has licensed its MediaFLO technology to Siano Mobile Silicon with no royalty payments may continue to fuel the legal fires that surround Qualcomm, given that Nokia happens to believe that it holds the core patents to IP datacasting and so might feel that Qualcomm is giving away Nokia patents. Of course Siano already uses DVB-H patents so presumably will pay royalties for these anyway once a license for these has been resolved.
But the fact that Qualcomm feels compelled not to charge for a new technology, given its prior excessive royalty habits, also serves to demonstrate how DVB-H continues to have the whip hand globally in the mobile TV market, as does other news of DVB-H successes this week.
In DVB-H markets this week MiTV and Nokia say they have a live DVB-H mobile TV service ready for Malaysia; TVI Portugal and Vodafone Portugal
say they have completed successful trials using DVB-H with help from France’s Thomson; France’s Expway’s says that it will provide the Elecronic Services Guide to be used by Hiwire in its Las Vegas DVB-H trial, which continues to remind us that MediaFLO will not have a free run in the US; while Envivio says that its has provided encoders for a Philippine rollout of DVB-H which is happening far earlier than anyone had expected.
The Siano decision must have been tough to make. Siano has a multi-format mobile TV tuner that works with DVB-H, T-DMB, DAB IP and other systems. By agreeing that it will add MediaFLO in some future version, it is taking on a big extra workload, in order to get a piece of an un-quantified market, while at the same time agreeing to compete head on with Qualcomm itself. We know that DVB-H market leader DiBcom has all but ruled out a shift to MediaFLO and our own mobile TV report (email [email protected] for details) predicts that although MediaFLO will be successful in the US, DVB-H will be the dominant form of mobile TV globally, taking around 50% of the global market share, and other services such as China and Japan’s homegrown technologies will also continue to play in large numbers.
A Siano FAQ conceded, ‘To be explicit, we believe DVB-H will be a larger market than FLO, and that ISDB-T and CMMB may probably also outnumber FLO in terms of subscribers,’ but then again the US market is going to make MediaFLO successful, so to NOT build a MediaFLO chip is to concede the US market.
Siano couldn’t say when it would offer MediaFLO on a chip, but said that it would be in plenty of time for the US volume markets developing over the next few years.
US start up Newport Media is the only other mobile TV specialist that has taken a deal with Qualcomm to license the technology and this was recently admitted by Qualcomm to be also royalty free, after earlier statements that were deliberately confusing about MediaFLO licensing, saying that it was bundled with CDMA patents. It was almost as if Qualcomm was saying, ‘look people can compete with us with our own standards, even this little start up can manage,’ but the deal has looked less than inviting to most other suppliers until Siano stepped forwards.
Siano is only the second company to get into real volume with DVB-H chips, after DiBcom, and it is likely to make good headway against newcomers in the MediaFLO market. It could be that the number of design wins for DiBcom have weighed heavily in this decision, and that Siano feels the need to keep out of DiBcom’s shadow. In a recent chat with Yannick Levy, the CEO of DiBcom, he told us that his chips could operate with a 3dB lower signal than all the other chips on the market, and that this dramatically lowered the cost of building DVB-H networks, and that this was due to the sensitivity of its second generation chipset. That’s a tough claim to compete with for latecomers such as Texas Instruments and Philips which have promised chip volumes in this market imminently. They might do better to license the DiBcom designs.
Qualcomm also this week issued more data about its PCCW MediaFLO trial which we alluded to briefly last week. PCCW has an integrated mobile TV service with 6 channels taken from its IPTV service. That elected peculiarly to use the Cell Broadcast System, an early version of MBMS which offers broadcasting over cellular frequencies.
Now it will conduct a technical trial of MediaFLO from May to November for testing purposes only. But as much as PCCW is a new force to be reckoned with on the mobile front (having begun on fixed lines and now has only 921,000 mobile customers) it was thought that it would continue down much the same route as its Cell Broadcast System, and shift the burden onto MBMS, the W-CDMA multicasting standard, which it has already had in technical trials. The truth is that a win for Qualcomm doesn’t only happen if MediaFLO is chosen and Qualcomm has demonstrated that its HSDPA chips can cope with MBMS at the same time, and this would be a natural fit for the PCCW handset technology.
Paul Berriman, CTO of PCCW said ‘The Hong Kong market is ready for this type of service, which is complimentary to our 3G-based interactive multimedia services, and we want to offer the best quality solution to our end-users. MediaFLO’s demonstrated success in recent trials and promises a compelling user experience that has the potential for widespread adoption in Hong Kong. This technical trial will evaluate our business model and content line-up with the goal of developing the right mix of services for a future mobile broadcast and interactive TV offering.’
Discount Qualcomm at your peril, but most rivals out there have gone on record saying they don’t think MediaFLO will make it outside of the US, and yet it persists in trials in the UK, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong and it may surprise naysayers yet and develop a wider market. There is also the chance of further wins in the US with operators other than AT&T and Verizon.
The Nokia and MiTV deal was announced as a collaboration to launch a DVB-H mobile broadcast TV service in Malaysia in the second half of 2007. We have always thought that Malaysia would go down this route, but didn’t expect it to have a working network prior to 2009, although a trial was created there during 2005.
Nokia Siemens Networks will take care of the entire deployment process which includes implementation, integration, and application development services and it will also maintain MiTV’s infrastructure on a turnkey basis and the new Nokia N77 handset will be offered.
MiTV will offer a yet to be named 3G mobile communication subsidiary utilizing the “018” prefix, which is rolling out now. There is every chance that the DVB-H network will also be used by other cellcos, or a second network built, as happened in Italy.
Meanwhile TVI Portugal and Vodafone Portugal say they have completed successful trials DVB-H using Thomson’s SmartVision interactive service platforms and mobile TV head-end, its Argos mobile TV encoders and it Opal DVB-H IP encapsulators.
The TVI trial consisted of eight live channels sent to a panel of users with mobile phones from Samsung, but no date for further development has been given.
Finally the Envivio deal in the Philippines is for its 4Caster M2 encoders with Dream Satellite TV, a brand of Philippine Multimedia Systems Incorporated (PMSI), for the first commercial deployment of DVB-H mobile TV services in the Philippines.
PMSI is currently on test broadcast with eight live free to air TV channels on Samsung handsets and will use both ISMACryp and SimulCrypt with other DRMs to secure content, because in the future, PMSI plans to offer pay-per-view channels