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Friday, 29 June 2007

EU to push home-grown mobile TV standard as DVB-H noise gets louder…

Reports originating on Dow Jones Newswires say that the European Commission is to give its support to the Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H) cell phone TV standard rather than alternatives such as the Qualcomm-pioneered MediaFlo and Terrestrial-Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (T-DMB) used in South Korea. The reports suggest that the decision will be made public by Viviane Reding, the Member of the European Commission responsible for Information Society and Media, in a document to be issued next month.

The EC’s support for DVB-H is not that surprising given the backing of ETSI and the involvement of Nokia and other regional investors. If the reports are correct, though, the move is a set-back for Qualcomm/Media FLO Technologies which has been trying pretty hard to get more European traction for its standard.

Responding to the reports in its ‘EuroView Daily Comment’ service the Ovum consultancy reckons that any EC backing for DVB-H could be failing to address the real issue here. “The willingness of the EU to promote a single standard for mobile broadcast in Europe has generated much debate among industry players, but overall, we question the real impact of this move, at least in the short term. Let's start by asking what is the greatest barrier today to mobile broadcast deployments in the EU? The main barrier is the lack of spectrum in the UHF frequency band,” asserts Ovum analyst Vincent Poulbere. “Based on the information we have, the EC’s move does not address this critical issue of spectrum availability, and hence won't change much of the current situation of DVB-H in Europe.”

Meantime, the noise from the DVB-H drum is getting louder. In Europe, for example, Viasat and TDC have just launched a DVB-H test in Denmark and it’s reported that MFD Mobile Fernsehen Deutschland has ambitions to build a DVB-H network in Germany. Commercial DVB-H services have already started in Albania, Finland and Italy, and other services are in various states of commercialisation in France, Germany, and Spain, with trials in other locations.

Further afield, this month alone Nokia and MiTV Corporation Sdn Bhd (MiTV) announced their collaboration to launch a commercial DVB-H service in Malaysia in the second half of 2007, Philippines Multi-media System Inc said it was to do likewise in its market, PGK unveiled a trial of the standard in Singapore, and Irdeto announced it had partnered with Broadcast Australia, Thomson and Samsung to demonstrate DVB-H in Sydney. There are already commercial DVB-H services on air in India and Vietnam, with networks in preparation in Qatar and the USA.
John Williamson