Competing Mobile TV Not Slowing Start of German Service
Both competing standards for mobile TV being discussed in Europe should be developed, said applicants for mobile TV licences in Germany. To start mobile TV services during the upcoming soccer World Cup, German media authorities published calls for tenders for the first mobile TV license based on the Digital Multimedia Bcstg. (DMB) standard. Network operators and hardware companies in Europe focused more on the Digital Video Bcstg.-Handheld (DVB-H) standard, mainly developed by European engineers and standardized at the European Telecom Standards Institute (ETSI).
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“The discussion about the standards is led with great vigor. But in our view as a mobile TV platform provider we don’t see them as competing,” said Henrik Rinnert, CEO of Mobile TV Germany (MFD), an applicant for the German mobile TV licence. Rinnert expects handhelds to support both standards. “Big hardware companies are prepared to produce devices for both standards,” said Ralph Piller, head of Bavarian consortium Walk'n Watch, which collaborates with Net Mobile AG, a provider of mobile content partnering with majors like Universal. Rinnert and Piller expect a trend to make chips both DMB and DVB-H capable -- “comparable to triband mobile phones,” said Rinnert. Consumers, said Rinnert, aren’t interested in what standard is used.
Technically the standards mainly differ in capacities, with DVB-H allowing broadcast of 25 programs over a 9 Mbps DVB channel. DMB allows 3 to 4 TV programs. DVB-H has been promoted by European industry and tested in pilot projects in EU countries like Finland, Czech Republic, France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Spain and Germany, but for the German World Cup project, media authorities of the German states agreed to jointly license one Germany-wide DMB platform.
“In Baden-Wuerttemberg as in Bavaria and some other states there simply are not frequencies available for DVB-H at the moment,” said Walter Berner, head of the technical dept. of the media authority in Baden-Wuerttemberg, which is coordinating licencing. Media authorities in cities like Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg are testing DVB-H because they have available frequency. “Germany-wide DVB-H will only be possible around 2008,” said Pillar, “and we can hope that at that time we will have EU-wide frequencies, too.” The EU Commission has invited experts on DVB-H to a major conference Feb. 23 that will address the standards questions, frequency planning and business models.
Meantime DMB preparations are under way at the network level, with DT subsidiary T-Systems preparing DMB broadcasting stations in a few major cities and S. Korea’s Samsung presenting the first DMB device for the European market at a GSM conference in Barcelona next week. S. Korean Minister of Information & Communication Chin Dae Je announced joint DMB projects with a Celtic-funded pilot project in Bavaria and a joint project for the Olympic Winter Games in Turin.
“We will help other countries to adopt this standard,” said Chin Dae Je, “and we expect a great business opportunity from it.” After the commercial start of DMB services in S. Korea last year, S. Korean industry and govt. are pushing for the adoption of the DMB standard. DMB-enabled handsets are built mainly by S. Korea’s LG Electronics and Samsung.
Some European observers recommend backing the European standard, to repeat Europe’s GSM success. European handheld producers like Nokia and Philips have participated in DVB-H- pilots. Meanwhile, Qualcomm, which promotes the CDMA standard, is pushing for a wireless multimedia standard called MediaFLO. But Castle Crown International’s Modeo will launch with DVB-H for mobile TV and content services in 30 major U.S. markets, under a partnership with Intel, Motorola, Nokia und Texas Instruments in the Mobile DTV Alliance.