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.