Israel based mobile TV chip maker Siano Mobile Silicon has landed its third round of funding of $17.5 million, led by the Israeli arm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and supported by all previous investors including JVP, Star Ventures, Walden Israel, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Inventec Appliances.
Siano has now raised $52 million, in three rounds of funding but what is surprising is that it has managed to secure funding at a time when more and more doubt is being heaped on mobile TV.
In France the DVB-H system has undergone its second delay, in Germany the concerted efforts of cellular operators has managed to prevent incumbent Mobile 3.0 from gaining enough traction to sell DVB-H services and Spain, Poland and the UK have long term problems with spectrum auctions for mobile TV. In the US MediaFLO sales figures have not been revealed and precious few other countries have managed a service launch during the past year with the notable exceptions of China, Brazil, Austria and Switzerland to go with the major mobile TV launches in Korea, Japan and Italy in previous years. Russia’s Sistema Mass Media is mid launch and a few of the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) have managed low level service launches (the Philippines has managed two).
The Siano investment optimism will have come primarily from its efforts in China, where it has patiently worked to produce the only outside designed CMMB STiMi chipset using the home designed Chinese technology. Other mobile TV chip companies mostly last had funding one or two years ago.
French DVB-H chip leader DiBcom says that it has delivered over 10 million components to different segments of the mobile TV market and may have reached profitability, but it went as far afield as Japan to get an unspecified amount of funding back in December from NIF SMBC and NTT Finance, since DiBcom created chips compatible with Japan’s ISDB-T standard, for automotive equipment for Japan.
Siano also introduced an ISDB-T chip set last year but so far we have no knowledge of any design wins in either Japan or Brazil, where the systems is used. Previous products have supported DVB-T, DVB-H and T-DMB mobile TV technologies.
Faultline has tracked a total of 104 mobile TV trials in around 55 countries and a considerable number of these will eventually lead to services being launched, but there is unlikely to be a single global standard, and instead the Siano policy of going after multiple protocols, supported on one chip, has been vindicated by the state of the market.
Eldad Tamir, co-founder and General Partner at DFJ-Tamir Fishman Ventures, commented: “We are thrilled to lead this round and invest in an outstanding company such as Siano. As a leading venture capital firm that keeps a constant eye out for noteworthy investment opportunities, we’ve been observing the mobile TV market and its ever-rising potential for some time now, and it quickly became clear to us that Siano is well positioned to become a true global industry leader.’
“The consumer market is now starting to fulfill the vision that gave birth to Siano back in 2004, namely that within just a few years, practically every single non-tethered consumer device with a color LCD would include digital TV function’, said Alon Ironi, CEO of Siano. ‘We are witnessing massive embedding of our products into a surprisingly wide range of devices, from mobile phones and notebooks to navigation devices, portable media players and even boom-boxes and digital photo frames.”
“The new capital will help Siano expand its sales and customer support facilities worldwide, build adequate silicon inventory to match the increasing demand for its products, and continue developing state-of-the-art solutions for the mobile TV market,” added Ironi.
We would expect one or two of the Siano rivals to begin falling by the wayside unless we hear of more funding rounds in the sector. Last year Texas Instruments put its own mobile TV chip on the back-burner, and we have not heard from players such as Newport Media, since it raised $30 million in November 2006. Also major chip players such as NXP, Infineon and Broadcom have been attracted more recently to this market.