Mobile TV: Welcome to a fragmented world

Thomas Husson | October 31, 2006, 04:27 AM

There was an interesting article in the IHT on a new mobile TV format, backed by the Chinese government and called StiMi, which stands for Satellite Terrestrial Interactive Multi-Service Infrastructure.

This announcement highlights two facts:

- When you think “standard”, always bear in mind the Chinese market may be large enough to have its own proprietary standard. Forget about Vodafone being the first worldwide mobile operator. In terms of subscribers, Vodafone is now the sandwich operator, number 2, between a Chinese operator and another Chinese operator.

- The standard war in the mobile TV space is thus increasing. I would not change a word in the title of a report on mobile TV that was published 6 months ago: “A fragmented market far from critical mass” (clients, click here to access the report).

There are currently around 15 solutions available if you include various frequencies and possible implementations, splitted in 3 main categories:

1- cellular broadcast technologies based on MBMS (backed by Ericsson) and TDtv (backed by IP Wireless). The good news for mobile operators is that they may not have spent billions on 3G in vain, those technologies re-using part of the 3G spectrum to broadcast data. Those solutions are not well-known in the industry, but are currently trialed by several players

2 – terrestrial broadcast technologies rely on a specific broadcast infrastructure adapted to the mobile phones. DVB-H (Digital Video Boradcast-handheld) re-uses part of the existing DVB-T infrastructure, as well as T-DMB (Terrestrial-Digital Multimedia Broadcast) or DAB-IP, which both re-use the Digital Audio Broadcast infrastructure. I could also mention MediaFlo (not only reserved to the US, as highlighted by a trial with SKY in the UK or KDDI in Japan) or ISDB-T in Japan…The main difficulty here is to find the suitable spectrum in each European country. DVB-H is already available in Italy (3 claimed to have 110,000 subscribers in the first 5 weeks, which was analyzed as a tremendous success: my take is that it was only due to World Cup effect, particularly high when Italy won the World Cup, and I don’t say this because I am French…) and will soon be in Finland. DAB-IP and T-DMB are available respectively in the UK (with Virgin’s Mobile) and in Germany with Debitel and Mobilkom. Unfortunately, those technologies do not allow many channels to be broadcasted and may be intermediate solutions. This is the interesting challenge of wholesale resellers such as BT Movio or MFD, which may benefit from a transition period until they open to other broadcasting technologies. That being said, those technologies have been launched because they were immediately ready to market contrary to DVB-H in many markets, which cannot be rolled-out in the UHF band quickly.

3 – satellite broadcast technologies are using a satellite to broadcast content via terrestrial repeaters or directly to mobile phones. There are 2 main solutions: one backed from Alcatel (based on DVB-H in the so-called S-Band), the other one based on S-DMB and already available in South Korea. Today's announcement (click here for more info) that Samsung (which is also backing with LG the T-DMB solution) would work closely with Alcatel to provide mobile TV phones based on S-DVB-H is a good news for the French giant since it had so far suffered from a lack of interest from the main handset manufacturers. The great news is that those solutions enable a large coverage area.

I had the opportunity to moderate a panel at Mobile Content World on the mobile TV issue, and hopefully the debate did not focus on the technology part but on content issues. One interesting takeaway was that content producers are not at a stage where they are ready to share risks and to produce made-for-mobile content immediately at the production stage. In a nutshell, the Fox is ready to have a minimum guaranteed to produce the so-called 24h mobisodes but not to ask Kiefer Sutherland to re-shoot for mobile. In other words, this was a great marketing coup to raise awareness on mobile TV but there is no return on investment until the installed base is here…

Beyond this mobile broadcasting technology soup, if you want to discuss business model and consumer behaviour issues, drop me a line or contact your client / account manager to set up a call.