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Winner of the Triple Play

“It’s like the Roman Catholic church after Gutenberg.”

The sky may be falling on old media, but new media distribution – via satellite – is rising fast in Asia.Take, for example, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) which is finalizing the design of a mobile television satellite.

The mobile video service, some two years away, would use India’s own Insat-4E or Gsat-6 satellites. INSAT-4A, the first satellite of the INSAT-4 series, delivers Direct-to-Home (DTH) broadcast and was placed in Geosynchronous Orbit last month. An unnamed private firm in the U.S. has developed a technology called Digital-Enabled Video Audio Service, and is talking to ISRO to lease transponder space.

According to a report in Hindu Business Line, their new DBS satellite will deliver MPEG 4 videos to (very) small screens in India. Portio Research says India and China, with 1.067 billion combined total subscribers are the two biggest mobile growth markets over the next decade. India has a population of 1.08 billion, but less than 0.01 per cent broadband penetration. China has 1.3 billion.WiMAX is seen as the broadband solution. MILTON (Microwave Light Organized Network), can have as many as 32 focused beam “petals”, each delivering some 50 Mbps on the unlicensed 5.8 GHz band.

ProtoStar acquires and operates direct-to-home (DTH) satellites and broadband Internet access services in the Asia-Pacific region. Protostar plans to launch a satellite in mid 2006. They say their service will reach 3 billion people in India, Indonesia, China, Taiwan, the Philippines and South East Asia.Could a WiMAX/satellite partnership offer the triple play — everything, everywhere, all the time?

It’s already happening.

MBSat (above) is delivering direct to cellphone video all over Japan. It uses a satellite with a 12 meter S band (2.6 GHz) antenna. MobaHo, with 8 video channels, uses ISDB-T, to deliver satellite TV and radio broadcasts specifically to Japan, says Wireless Watch Japan. ISDB-T is a Japanese version of T-DMB. Korea’s satellite delivered DMB (Digital Media Broadcasting) features 11 video channels, 25 audio channels, and 3 data channels.Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) developed a terrestrial service (T-DMB) in competition with satellite-based (S-DMB) service of promoted by Tu Media and Korea’s largest cellular provider, SK Telecom. “One difference between S-DMB and T-DMB is that S-DMB is nationwide, but T-DMB will a regional service,” says Peobmin Ryu, the MIC director in charge of DMB. “Outside of Seoul, we will issue three licenses per region starting in the second half of 2006.”

Samsung’s WiBro phone, the SPH-H1000, will support both satellite delivered television and terrestrial WiBro for voice and high speed data. Korea Telecom, the country’s largest fixed-line carrier, has spearheaded the WiBro initiative. The new service is expected to provide Korea Telecom with additional sales totaling about 10 trillion won ($10 billion) through 2010. Cellular carrier, SK Telecom, will also channel 170 billion won into WiBro this year alone, bigger than the 100 billion won observers originally expected.

Cellular operators in Asia can’t grow penetration much further than 100%, so they are looking to multi-media and mobile video to enhance monthly revenue.

The Digital Media Broadcasting (DMB) standard is cloned from the European-developed Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) with advanced multimedia specs, including MPEG4 video, added. DMB can be transmitted by satellite or terrestrially. After the start of Asian S-DMB and T-DMB commercial services in May and December of 2005, European operators such as TF1 and the BBC will start T-DMB trials. Engadget has a good review of global DVB-T and DAB implementations.

DirecTV Group said it planned to work with “an array of partners” to bring its video programming to devices other than televisions. DirecTV is rumored to be working with EchoStar for tower bids for a nationwide WiMAX network. Murdock’s cue for announcing two-way WiMax/DirecTV might be the Intel Developer Forum this March, with Beceem’s Mobile WiMAX in laptops and PDAs. Samsung is buying in.

Perhaps Motorola’s basestations could use PicoChip and Arraycomm for 1-5 mile coverage and Clearwire’s 2.5 GHz licenses for Mobile WiMAX with Intel and Microsoft. And MediaFLO or DVB-H for MobileTV. Or not.

The large land mass of the United States makes satellite delivered video more of a challenge. So far no satellite-to-cell video proposal has been announced in the United States although both Qualcomm (with MediaFLO) and CrownCastle (with Modeo), plan terrestrial networks this year for mobile video.Whether mobile video will pencil out for cellular operators remains to be seen. Verizon’s V-Cast, which uses an EV-DO channel, has proven popular, with some 500,000 subscribers (at $15/month). Sprint also has more than 500,000 subscribers for MobiTV ($9.95/mo), which offers more than 30 channels of live and on-demand content. But offloading bandhogging music & video to another carrier may be inevitable.

Winner of the Triple Play

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