Now that MediaFLO, Qualcomm’s mobile television solution, is
supported by AT&T/Cingular, as well as Verizon, it looked like Sprint would follow along.
Not so.
Sprint Nextel has decided not to use the MediaFLO network to offer mobile TV services, after it wrapped up its MediaFLO trial last month, reports RCR Wireless.
Qualcomm’s MediaFlo, a proprietary standard, looked like it was becoming a defacto standard in the United States. Alltel, the nation’s No. 5 carrier, counts around 11 million customers, will also begin trialing the MediaFLO soon. But T-Mobile USA, which is also trialing Qualcomm’s MediaFLO, is also considering Hiwire. So that leaves two major U.S. cellular carriers still undecided on a mobile TV path.
Hiwire is the mobile TV business of Aloha Partners and uses television channels 54 and 59 in the 700 MHz band. Crown Castles’s Modeo, using DVB-H at 1.7 GHz, is still waiting for a suitor. The Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld standard is supported by Nokia and Sony Ericsson, among others, and has broad support in Europe.
Qualcomm is covering its bets with a new chip that supports three-way compatibility. Qualcomm’s new chip supports Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service via MediaFLO, DVB-H and the Japanese Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial (ISDB-T) system.
Qualcomm says it allows mobile phone network operators to offer streamed mobile TV services more efficiently by multicasting programs instead of having to establish point-to-point links for each device as they currently do.
Other mobile television technologies include MobiTV which has demonstrated a unified multicast and unicast television solution for Mobile WiMAX. It enables Mobile WiMAX operators (like Sprint) to offer premium mobile television over a two-way IEEE 802.16e network.
IP Wireless says their TDtv is designed to be a very low cost overlay network over existing spectrum. TDtv operates in the universal unpaired 3G spectrum bands that are available across Europe and Asia at 1900MHz and 2010MHz.
Meanwhile, Harris is introducing a new mobile TV standard for broadcasters. Harris will reveal more plans about the proposed “ATSC Mobile” standard at NAB 2007, in April.
Harris places itself in direct competition with Samsung’s A-VSB, also based on the ATSC standard. Samsung demonstrated the standard at CES in Las Vegas last month. ATSC is the standards body for U.S. digital television is currently considering standardizing A-VSB.
ATSC Mobile is “in-band and optimized for mobile pedestrian and handheld-type services,” said Jay Adrick, vice president of strategic development for Harris Broadcast Communications Division. “The platform has performance specifications that exceed A-VSB. In fact, we have about a 7 dB greater signal threshold in performance than A-VSB.”
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