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Thursday, 16 August 2007

Regional champions ahead for mobile TV standards?

According to a new analysis from IMS Research a strong regional base for various mobile TV standards is emerging. The company cites market developments over the last few months: the European Commission favoring DVB-H as the pan-European broadcast mobile TV standard (click), AT&T abandoning Modeo and DVB-H in favor of MediaFLO, and Crown Castle’s subsequent divestiture of Modeo’s spectrum (click).

IMS Research is forecasting that by 2011 the Americas region will account for 60% of worldwide FLO subscribers. Similarly, Europe is forecast to claim 61% of worldwide DVB-H/DVB-SH subscribers. Other standards, such as T-DMB and ISDB-T, are also expected to become increasingly region-specific between 2007 and 2011, with an increasing number of these standards’ subscribers coming respectively from Korea and Japan.

“Operator and government decisions about which mobile TV standard to deploy in each country or region depend on a number of variables including spectrum availability, existing cellular and DTT infrastructure, market needs, and national political and economic interests,” reasons research director at IMS Research Anna Hunt. “This has resulted in a situation where in certain regions, different standards gained a distinct advantage in building the consensus required to deploy a broadcast network, thereby gaining the first-mover advantage so key in a standards war.”

And in other (technical) mobile TV news the FLO Forum membership this week announced the approval of FLO Series II and FLO Series III Testing Plans, meaning that a complete set of FLO Series I, Series II and Series III Testing Specifications is available to the market, with Series I specifications already published by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) as standards TIA-1102, TIA-1103 and TIA-1104.

FLO Series II (FLO Services Testing) is a suite of application and service-related MediaFLO qualification tests and their descriptions for standardisation. A corresponding service Series FLO Device Qualification System (FDQS) facilitates execution of tests.

FLO Series III (FLO/Non-FLO Concurrent Operation) verifies that MediaFLO services do not interfere with non-MediaFLO radio-based services and features on the handset. This specification currently addresses CDMA2000 1X, 1xEV-DO a-GPS and Bluetooth test cases.

“Testing and certification is a vital part of the effective interoperability and deployment of FLO networks and services,” says FLO Forum chair Noel Richardson. “The FLO Forum T&C Committee’s work towards specifying these minimum criteria FLO tests means that an organisation building a FLO-based mobile broadcast business will be able to bring their products and services to market quickly through clear specifications for device behaviour.”

Meantime, the 3G mobile TV extension that is MBMS continues to attract interest. Hutchison 3 in Australia has announced that it has been trialling that technology over a six week period in partnership with Ericsson. “MBMS as part of the 3G evolution is an attractive technology not only because of its flexibility and efficiency, but because it’s quick and easy to deploy and leverages existing infrastructure,” argues Kursten Leins, strategic marketing manager - Multimedia, Ericsson. “MBMS allows an unlimited number of users to watch the same mobile TV programme at the same time in the same area, as well as enabling valuable user interaction with advertisements, campaigns and programmes.”
John Williamson