Panorama

In my opionion "the responsible" to the delay in the mobile TV using DVB-H in some countries are the television and mobile phone operators which are suffering the consequences of the global economic crisis. As I read in an article, in order to develop DVB-H the mobile/TV operator, need to reinforce and adapt the current DVB-T infrastructure. But that suppose a cost to them, and the operators are experimentiing income reductions due the economic crisis, and they need to cut their investment (costs) in order to maintain their margins. Operators invest their limited resources in finishing and enhancing their current 3G/3.5G network that they need to amortize.

there are challenges aplenty across the whole mobile TV technology spectrum

I believe mobile TV is createing a new ecosystem for the mobile industry. It brings together different indsutires broadcast companies, manufacturers, cable TV and the movie industry.

I decide to check how many mobile phone are available that support this technologyes and there are a few in Europe, and not all are available in the market, so why operators are going to invest in a technology which the mass market can't access?

pd: I recommend to read the following article: "Mobile TV Future: long term planning" (Grajski K.,2008)

Conclusion

I decided to do this blog about mobile TV because I think is a hot current topic. Technology standards have been set, spectrum has been allocated in the different countries and the content is there. However, the industry is fragmented, with different markets sustaining different standards and spectrums bands. Content providers, broadcasters and handset manufacturers are working and competeing for market share. Mobile TV is an opportunity to mobile network operators, which can create differentiation and new revenue incomes to maintain a competitive position,and reap the benefits of a new service.

I can say that the mobile television market is still young. Mobile TV is a reality but is an emerging service which is still far from being a mass-market introduced mobile service.

Mobile TV is a technology which is receiving a strong worldwide interest, wireless broadcasters, handset manufacturers and standardization bodies have been developing and researching technologies to enable and improve this service.

As I discussed in this blog, in the past decade different standards have been proposed for delivering mobile TV, such as DVB-H, T-DMB, MediaFLO and so on.
Mobile TV wants to provide to end users access to their favorite TV programs, anytime and anywhere on their handset devices. They can receive multimedia content either live (broadcast) or on-demand. Mobile TV firms want solutions to offer market standards that leverages the technology to provide the best, modular, end-to-end revenue generating solutions.

Experts say that mobile TV will be a killing application in the mass mobile service market, but at least here in Europe from what I can see nowadays (at least here in Spain and in the Netherlands) is that this service is far from being a service that captures the mobile phone users. Trials have been made in different countries (Barcelona World Mobile Congress 2008 ), and there is a positive feedback from the experiences.

I devoted some entries to discuss about unicast mobile TV services which already exist as part of the 3G/3.5G services, and in most of the countries is the only available option to access to TV-on-demand content. I have considered necessary to cover which technologies and standards are behind this service which has an important limitation, is not able to cope with large audience simultaneously and to deliver live programs. A lot of money has been invested on 3G technologies (UMTS) and companies consider essential to exploit their infrastructure providing services to get funds in return of their investment, and mobile TV is an option.

Due to spectrum scarcity, the broadcast technology selected needs to satisfy operators needs which share frequencies and access networks.

But the interesting discussion is on broadcast mobile TV where the selection for a mobile TV broadcast technology is an open issue. Mobile network operators can be able to offer scalable, efficient, high-quality access to content service to unlimited number of users by leveraging mobile TV broadcast technologies, but also maintain the inband transmission over cellular (3G and 4G) to enable contextual interactive services.

Four broadcast technologies, which I described, are dominating the broadcast mobile TV market T-DMB, DAB-IP, DVB-H and FLO. As I mentioned none of these standards is really global yet, but they are all fairly the standard dominant in some areas.

Market fragmentation can be a problem, because according to the literature to a successful adoption an penetration of a technology, standards interoperability is important. Stabilization of standards is important, so could be necessary a common standard in order to reduce market fragmentation caused by different alternatives for mobile TV transmission. Currently DVB-H is the strongest standard for future It is already the most widely extended and used standard in Europe and is spreading in other non-European countries. In this case the bandwagon effect is taking place, DVB-H was one of the first market open-standards and now has an advantage over later competing standards.

DVB-H is the technology chose by the EU, as the European standard for the development of mobile TV. One of the reasons of the election is because DVB-H has its roots in the adopted and well established in Europe digital TV standard DVB-T. So DVB-H based on the DVB-T standard is to a large extend compatible, and is spectrally compatible with DVB-T networks.

In Europe, the DVB-H technology leads the way in the deployment and implementation of broadcast networks but is facing uncertainties linked to regulatory and business issues in some countries that are delaying the implementation and start up . This delay from my point of view can affect the DVB-H top standard position, because may have to compete with alternative technologies.

According to the literature the selection of an standard determines the options to configure the market. So the decisions that the EU does about the adoption of an standard will have consequences in the mobile TV industry.

There are many interest on this game, telecommunication companies, mobile handset manufacturers, service providers, etc defend their own technologies.

On the broadcast mobile TV debate the wirless industry leaders are exerting pressure to the European Commision to allow other technologies to compete in the emerging mobile TV market rather than supporting and forcing a single technological standard. Firms like the FLO group defend a standard neutrality in Europe. Industry leaders are right when they say that mobile TV is a cutting-edge service, a case where only time and a flexible market will tell which technology will provide the best service.

According to the literature in a European and also in a national level there is a tendency to link standards to legislation, and the EU goal is to satisfy the global requirements laid down in laws and recommendations, and that’s what they are doing with mobile TV and DVB-H.

I think that the EU is insisting in an early stage on a particular standard, when they do not know that maybe other available alternatives will better suite the market. From my point of view only time and a flexible market will show which technology will suite most the different actors. According to the literature the conversion to a new standard is costly, because needs to face the actual installed base influenced by the network effect, so is necessary to choose the best standard without rushing.

In other areas the EU position was to defend a neutral regulation, letting market actors decide upon the rollout of an standard, in all this cases the different actors benefit from that situation of “freedom”.

According to the literature variety-reducing standards have positive and negative effects to the industry. So I can understand EU position , Europe took a big lead over the US in mobile services by establishing a single GSM standard so mobile phone users can roam across the different countries of the continent (literature case), so they want to ensure that mobile TV actors will not face different rules in each state. I think that this position will contribute to innovation, because with a single standard, companies will invest with confidence in new innovative technologies supported by the selected standard (reduce risk). That will benefit international trade.

But has negative effect, is too early to determine which is the better standard, this is the reason why different tests and studies have been done in different countries. And also the EU position will exclude other firms (lock-in effect) that are applying other technologies. This situation is an anticompetitive-effect of the standards.

To sump up, mobile TV is a complex issue with many different actors and technologies, ut From my point of view mobile actors require integration capabilities in demanding multi-vendor, multi-technology environments, in order to quickly cope with the different Mobile TV solutions.

MediaFLO

MediaFLO Media Forward Link Only, is a technology proposed by QualComm and uses a netwotk that uses a limit number of high-power transmission towers to deliver high-quality streaming multimedia. This technology was first owned by QulaComm and now further enhanced by QualComm jointly with the FLO Forum (a multy-company initiative) that works for the efficient transmission of multiple multimedia streams to mobile devices. FLO technology was designed specifically for the economical and efficient distribution of multimedia content to millions of wireless users. (MediaFLO)

MediaFLO uses OFDM transmission (like DVB-H) with approximately 4K carriers with QPSK or 16-QAM modulation of the carriers. It also uses division multiplexing, that is similar to what DVB-H refers to as a time slicing (check last entree), to transmit specific
content at specific time intervals.

MediaFLO can be technically characterized as follows (Yeun, 2007):
- Turbo code algorithms: that allow more effective aggressive error correction than is
possible using the traditional Viterbi coding present in other systems.
- Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC): If the packet is received perfectly, then the receiver does not have to calculate the Reed Solomon outer code, allowing additional receiver power savings.
- Time interleaving data: contribute to reduce the impact of impulse noise and changing multi-path, but can affect negatively increasing channel acquisition time, making surfing difficult (change channels).

The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) has ratified four other FLO-standard TIA-1099, 1102, 1103 and 1004 - that meet the interface specification for FLO satellite, with the minimum performance standards for devices with performance standards less transmitter, and the application protocol for testing devices and transmitters, respectively (Qualcomm, 2007).


MediaFLO is an ITU-R recommended mobile broadcast technology. Recently (MediaFLO Forum, 2009) MediaFLO Technologies received the approval of ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards), they publish ETSI TS 1 02 589, “Forward Link Only Air Interface; Specification for Terrestrial Mobile; Multimedia Multicast.”
According to the literature of the lecture, is important for a technology, critical in wireless environment, to ensure a global standard. This fact is important to the industry stakeholders, because operators have the freedom to use the technology in their business model, regulators gain the ability to use and provide a technology which use neutral spectrum policy using an open standard, and also benefits the semiconductors and electronic component manufacturers that have access to a new market based on FLO mobile broadcast solutions.
MediaFLO is a technology that according the corporative web site is actually working in USA (2007) and trials have been completed in Japan, UK, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc.

In U.S. the two largest wireless carriers, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, are adopting MediaFlo. Samsung and LG are two phone makers whose equipment is compatible with the MediaFLO network. I think is interesting to mention that QualComm announced that is going to expand their services to 39 new markets in USA, the reason is the liberation of the spectrum that is generating the transition to digital TV. USA is the country which MediaFLO have more presence according the following article, one reason is because in Europe the standard choosen by the European Comission (EC) is DVB-H, so the MediaFLO standard has a uphill battle trying to provide mobile TV in Europe.


But does is mean that the EC’s decision will cut off MediaFlo from Europe? I do not hink so, as I read in an article on the online newspaper “moconews”, MediaFLO will apply a different strategy in Europe where MediaFLO USA in the U.S. purchased spectrum, aggregated content (programming), and built a mobile broadcast network., in Europe will only supply the technology to the operators.

Technically MediaFLO is better, because started later and was able to cope and improve some aspects that other technologies like DVB-H lack, has significant cost and frequency advantages. (Medford, 2008)

I decide to include the following video, that provides a interview to Omar Javaid, the Senior Director of Busines Development for Qualcomm MediaFLO Technologies, discusses the MediaFLO technology, the future of mobile TV and consumer experience in the U.S. market.

References:

Medford, C. (2008, 02 06). RED Herring. Retrieved 07 25, 2009, from Qualcomm to Spin Off MediaFLO?: http://www.redherring.com/Home/23690

Yeun, C. Y. (2007). IEEE Xplore. Retrieved 5 19, 2009, from Mobile TV Technologies: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4459487%2F4475588%2F04475607.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4475607&authDecision=-203