Mobile DTV to notebook PCs will take off internationally in 2007-...

“2007 and 2008 will be where the hockey stick really starts to take off, not only for the U.S.” but also Europe and China, gearing up for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he said: “Broadcast sports events… where everybody’s watching is really going to spur this mobile DTV growth.” No longer will a fan need to miss a game while shopping with a spouse, Tsui said. In contrast to cellphones’ tiny displays, a notebook screen viewed at normal distance fills the eye as much as a 50” TV from 8’, he said: “It basically is filling up your field of view, and it’s a very good display, so it’s equivalent to your high-definition screen at home,” Tsui said. Notebook TV is enabled by better battery life, he said. Laptops will get broadcasts over WiMAX and cellular networks, though cellular reception creates interference risks, Tsui said. Even at 320x240 resolution, 8 min. of video eats bandwidth equivalent to 240 min. of cellphone talk time, so mobile carriers will build broadcast networks to avoid swamping their cell systems, he said. The mobile DTV technology in handhelds won’t suffice in notebooks, which can’t be repositioned as easily to improve reception, Tsui said. The technology also must coexist with a notebook’s other wireless technologies, he said. A particular challenge is dealing, via receiver filtering, with a choice of cutting off GSM or the upper 10-20 UHF channels, Tsui said. He focused largely on Asia in his remarks, the last in a series at successive IDFs on mobile DTV around the world. Few projections are available, but Intel expects the medium’s growth in the region to track the huge growth expected in mobile TV handsets, he said. Tsui’s own spot tests riding around in Tokyo, Shanghai and Taipei registered signal-to- noise ratios of 34-38 dB, considerably better than the 10-15 needed, he said; this shows “you can get adequate signal levels” even with a small antenna. China’s recently adopted DMB-T/H standard offers even higher mobility than Japan’s ISDB-T and S. Korea’s T-DMB -- in contrast to the U.S.’s ATSC, which allows none, he said. And China’s standard supports full 1080i HDTV up to about 60 mph, unlike the QVGA normally enabled by its neighbors’, Tsui said. “Enhanced ATSC will try to improve mobility, but it’s still not OFDM [orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing], and that’s sort of one of the prerequisites” of mobile HD, he said.