One of the gaps in our database of over 80 mobile TV trials was just who was providing the equipment to Sistema Mass Media (SMM) in Russia, for a Moscow DVB-H service which would be repeated in 16 of Russia’s top cities, each offering 16 TV channels, and all of them supposed to be operational by the end of this year.
Thomson Grass Valley has been first to break silence this week saying that it will provide most of the set up, including head end, with in-built statistical multiplexing, the all important IP encapsulator and the satellite distribution platform. We suspect that it may have some other suppliers that so far it’s not talking about. Handsets might come from anywhere, especially given the fact that Nokia has two Russian trials operational, but we wouldn’t bet against France’s Sagem being in there somewhere as well.
Sistema was known to be working with implementer T-Systems, with some involvement from South Korea Telecom. Other mobile TV trials and services in Russia all use DVB-H technology, and have included Nokia and Samsung on handsets, operators Digital Teleradiobroadcasing and Teleset, and transmitter producers Rohde & Schwarz and Vigintos Electronika, based in Lithuania.
In Yekaterinburg in the Sverdlovsk region of Russia, Spain’s Sidsa has also supplied an end to end DVB-H system using transmitters from Mier Communicaciones, but this is only for a tiny region.
The extent of the Thomson service, with Moscow about to go live and a further 16 cities, each with more than 1 million population, would put this service in reach of around 25 million of the 143 million Russian population. Given that Russia has even better mobile penetration than the USA, at over 84%, the system will be in reach of over 20 million mobile users, which would make it the second biggest DVB-H installation in the world, once complete.
‘We wanted to get our mobile television service on air quickly, and turned to Thomson as we knew they had the capability to deliver a complex, highly functional system when we needed it’ said Dr Shub, deputy general and chief technical officer of SMM. ‘In particular, Thomson was the only company able to provide an innovative and cost-effective satellite distribution system as well as the headend infrastructure.’
Thomson has told us at Faultline in the past that 16 channels is relatively straightforward in an 8 MHz channel, and says that this number may eventually double, and talks about tight integration between statistical multiplexing, time slicing and encoder design being the key to high channel numbers.
The system will run from a single head end, distributed from Moscow to the other cities using available bandwidth on an existing satellite transponder.
The commercial launch will be in early 2008, through any Russian cellular operator that is happy to partner with Sistema.