LG Electronics said it will begin mass-producing mobile DTV receiver chips in June. The development will set “the stage for widespread availability to the industry for a range of new consumer electronics products,” LG said Friday. Its LG2160A chip has an automatic power-saving mode to extend battery life for viewing DTV on the go, the company said. It handles all the ATSC mobile DTV standard’s demodulating and equalization functions and outputs IP streams to enable AV decoding in compatible receivers, LG said.
Sarnoff Corp. said it will introduce new tools for testing and validating compliance with the ATSC Mobile DTV candidate standard at the NAB show next week.
Mobile video usage and sales are still growing and projected to continue growing despite the downturn in the economy -- though some forecasts for the nascent industry have been toned down, analysts and industry executives told us. Usage and awareness of mobile video services continues to grow, but spending on the services may not grow as quickly in 2009 as the industry expected last year, said Lewis Ward, IDC Research manager for mobile, media and entertainment. IDC cut by 10 percent its mobile entertainment sales growth forecasts for 2009 after the economy tanked, he said. “It is impacting the market,” he said.
The Advanced TV Systems Committee recommended ways for cable systems and other pay-TV companies to use direct reception to carry DTV programming that’s ultimately delivered to analog subscribers, the ATSC said. The effort was an “example of inter-industry cooperation to help ensure that the digital television transition is as smooth as possible for all consumers,” said Glenn Reitmeier, ATSC’s chairman.
Members of the Senate Commerce Committee are said to be drafting a bill to delay the nationwide switch to digital TV from Feb. 17, according to lobbyists tracking the transition. Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., is thought to be involved in the work, they said.
LAS VEGAS -- No specific date was provided for the U.S. launch of mobile DTV by members of the Open Mobile Video Coalition at a news conference at CES Thursday. The group said only that the launch will come in 2009. But it did announce other plans for the initial broadcaster rollout. Participating companies demonstrated mobile DTV for the first time at the show using the candidate standard recently chosen by the group after the ATSC Mobile DTV standard setting process.
Americans are overpaying for DTV sets because of exorbitant royalties levied by patent holders that license the technology on unreasonable and discriminatory terms, a group that includes TV makers Vizio and Westinghouse Digital claimed Friday. In a petition due to be filed with the FCC Friday, the group was to ask the commission to initiate a rulemaking to regulate the patent fees, and to impose fines on licensors judged to be non-compliant.
DTV preparedness continues to improve, but “the pace at which U.S. households are getting ready has slowed down slightly” in the last month, Nielsen said. It estimates that 6.8 percent of U.S. TV homes are completely unprepared for the switchover - no TV sets are connected to a pay-TV service, a DTV converter box or have a built-in ATSC tuner. And 10 percent of homes aren’t completely ready, Nielsen said. The numbers are down from 7.4 percent and 10.3 percent last month.
Broadcasters will probably build mobile DTV facilities before manufacturers put ATSC mobile receivers in devices, Sinclair CFO David Amy told investors at a UBS conference Tuesday. “The challenge for the industry is going to be what to we do first,” he said. “My guess on that is that we as broadcasters will have to initiate the model and just start broadcasting mobile content and allow the manufacturers to follow us.” The ATSC recently approved as a candidate standard the framework for TV stations to offer a mobile DTV service. Amy expects the final standard will be approved by May, and it will be fall before there’s widespread adoption. Though mobile DTV has been a big focus for Sinclair, it hasn’t been as aggressive about online opportunities, Amy said. “We haven’t spent a whole lot of time talking about Internet revenue,” he said. “It’s an area in which we've notably not been aggressive in going after.” But as Sinclair’s advertisers seek more online ad opportunities, the company will provide them, he said. “It’s not lost on us, and we're becoming more aggressive in terms of going after that money.”
Fine-tuning of the candidate standard document that lays out the framework for U.S. broadcasters to offer a mobile DTV service will continue until year-end, though the Advanced TV Systems Committee approved the plan last week. The system is based on LG’s and Harris’ Mobile Pedestrian Handheld system (CD May 15 p2), said Brett Jenkins, Ion Media director of technology strategy and development. He said the higher layers describing how receivers will switch channels, display and onscreen guide and other advanced features rely on other mobile TV work done by the Open Mobile Alliance. “The ATSC working group spent a lot of time thinking about what needed to be reinvented and what didn’t,” Jenkins said. “One reason why this standard was able to be moved so quickly was because there already has been a lot of work done.”