A large U.S. television broadcaster has announced good results from recent trials in Chicago and Denver of mobile TV using a draft standard from the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC).
The Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC), an alliance of local and national TV broadcasters, hopes to see members roll out commercial mobile TV services late next year. To date mobile TV services, like Qualcomm’s MediaFlo (using Channel 56 on the 700 MHz band) and MobiTV (using cellular frequencies) have achieved only limited success.
The Open Mobile Video Coalition hopes to offer free mobile televison service using broadband television frequencies. It will take a chunk of the 19 Mbps DTV data stream and dedicate it to mobile television.
Ion Media Networks said it found it relatively easy to set up two mobile channels in each city and reception was better than expected. Ion Media’s stations WCPX and KPXC have been multicasting two standard definition mobile channels since August. LG Electronics and Harris Corp., whose technology was selected for the ATSC standard, provided prototype mobile TV receivers and transmission equipment for the tests.
“We are sold on the viability of the [ATSC] service,” said Brett Jenkins, director of technology strategy and development for Ion Media. “We are very confident this technology will work, and it’s viable to put in consumer’s hands,” he added.
ATSC-M/H is being developed to support a variety of services including free television and pay TV. In addition, non-real-time content download and data broadcasting services such as real-time navigation data for in-vehicle use are being explored.
Broadcasters are given our spectrum free. Local stations are generally run by group owners who can pretty much do whatever they want with our frequencies in exchange for offering “public service”.
“Public service” means lots of “reality” shows, sex and murder shows.
Wait until the 1Q 2009 financials are announced. Then NAB’s group owners will lobby Congress for pay tv and premium data services using the OMVC standard.
But it won’t work.
Today virtually every country on the planet (except the US, Canada and Mexico) has rejected ATSC. COFDM-based DVB-T is clearly superior standard for mobile television. The ATSC gang mandated that all royalties of their ghost-prone 8-VSB DTV signal go to them.
The USA is stuck with multipath-prone ATSC because U.S. broadcasters saw no future in mobile television. DVB-T can be received with rabbit ears indoors and can be used for mobile television outdoors. ATSC, not so much.
In the NAB’s view, “public service” means the public pays. And they get 300 million pops for free.
NextWave Wireless plans to give WiMAX operators the ability to deliver mobile TV and digital audio over their networks. Their MXtv technology is compatible with the 802.16e standard. NextWave also has a joint development agreement with Huawei to integrate MXtv into their WiMAX products.
ICO and Clearwire hope to deliver faster, cheaper, better mobile tv than MobiTV, MediaFlo, WiMAX or ATSC.
Most in the industry thought mobile video would be delivered by Qualcomm’s MediaFLO and other multicast TV platforms, but that hasn’t been the case. Now that nearly every feature phone is equipped with a video player, consumers have turned their attention to unicast content like YouTube. In 2008, 3.8% of consumers are already using a 3G video service — a small number, but a significant rise from 1.1% in 2007. When it came to watching video on YouTube or other fixed Internet Web sites, 54.6% had done so in 2008 versus 41.3% in 2007.
Jupiterresearch/Forrester’s latest report shows mobile TV adoption now at just one percent, and interest in all types of mobile TV is just over half what it was in 2006, with the most interest around watching live TV streams – a mere nine percent of US survey respondents.
Related mobile television articles on Dailywireless include; Broadcasters Unite Around One Mobile TV Standard, Mobile TV War at NAB, NAB 2007: Dead Man Walking?, Mobile TV: Six Flavors, Mobile Livecasting, $99 Settop = Free Triple Play?, HughesNet + Wayport + ICO/DVB-SH, ICO Deploys 40 Foot Antenna, ICO G-1 In Space, Dish Network Testing DVB-SH, Cable Goes Wireless, MobiTV Combines Unicast & Multicast, AT&T Goes with FLO, Samsung Phones Do Media, Dishes, NAB: Unlicensed Devices Threaten America, What’s Dish Network Planning?, WiMAX TV from NextWave, BBCiPlayer on iPhone, MediaFLO: In Trouble?, YouTube Mobilizes, Motorola Does DVB-H, Italy Testing DVB-SH Mobile TV, Software Defined Radio: DVB-H, too?, Original Content on Sprint Mobile TV, The War on Mobile TV, ICO Wants Its Mobile TV – via DVB-SH, MobileTV: Modeo KOed by Crown, and Mobile TV War at NAB.
