European Commission Picks DVB-H for Mobile DTV
The European Commission (EC) picked Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld (DVB-H) to be the single European mobile TV standard Wednesday, enraging supporters of rival mobile broadcast formats. The EC will add DVB-H to the European Union’s official standards list in the coming weeks, and may propose to mandate the technology’s use next year, it said. The Commission said it chose a single standard to tackle technological fragmentation and boost mobile TV deployment, but opponents said the non-technology-neutral approach could cripple Europe’s competitive marketplace.
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The EC’s mobile TV guidelines will address spectrum, regulatory and interoperability issues, it said. The EC will promote consensus among its 27 member states for the DVB-H standard, encourage member states to make the UHF band and other spectrum frequencies available for mobile broadcasting “as quickly as possible,” and harmonize member states’ mobile TV regulations, it said.
The move to a single standard is a blow to proponents of rival mobile TV technologies MediaFLO, Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) and Digital Audio Broadcasting IP (DAB- IP). “The market was expected to harmonize through technological innovation and chipset interoperability sometime in the near term,” said Datamonitor analyst Chris Khouri.
The industry’s hesitation to agree on a standard delayed commercial launch of mobile TV, EC said. Meanwhile, Asia and others of “Europe’s competitors” have made significant progress, “partly due to state intervention,” it said. The EC picked DVB-H due to its wide use in Europe and abroad, and because it is compatible with DVB-T, the main European technology for terrestrial TV, it said.
Choosing a mobile TV standard will push European companies to the technological forefront, much like the EC’s previous mandate for the GSM standard did, it said. But that analogy is no good, said Kamil Grajski, president of the FLO Forum, which backs Qualcomm’s MediaFLO technology. “The mobile TV industry is still in its early stages, but the GSM mandate came after GSM had launched with wide commercial success.”
Picking a single standard does not solve all interoperability problems. “The biggest challenge… will be the different encryption standards selected by various EU states and [telecom] operators,” said Quentin Howard, president of WorldDMB, which promotes the Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) mobile TV standard.
The Commission will also open the L-band, another spectrum frequency, as a “fallback” solution should UHF spectrum not become immediately available, it said. That’s a bad idea too, Howard said, since L-band access is an “essential part of the successful roll out of DAB/DAB+ and DMB services in Europe.” Using it as the Commission intends could fragment the band and “render it incompatible for use in Europe,” he said.
Rival technology backers pointed to a lack of technology neutrality as their largest problem with the EC decision. “Europe’s citizens and economy will not benefit from EC intervention that restricts technology and innovation,” Howard said. “WorldDMB members from across Europe… believe that mandating only DVB-H risks isolating Europe when the huge Asian markets of China and Korea have already adopted DMB,” he said.