Heather McLean, freelance journalist, takes a look at one of the hottest topics at the show, mobile TV, and finds that despite warnings to move on, there are still battles being fought over the best technology for digital broadcast mobile TV.
3GSM for me this year was a frenzy of discussion and argument around mobile TV. Talks on what technology would be the best to run services over, from DVB-H and MediaFLO to DVB-SH, dominated conversation. However, realists urged the industry to stop speculating on specification and start questioning which frequencies would actually be available in the UK and Europe to purchase.
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Realist Peter MacAvock, executive director at the DVB Project, states there is no point talking incessantly about whether to use DVB-H, DVB-SH or MediaFLO, when currently the choice of where to put the technology is slim: “Everyone is talking about technology for mobile TV. What we should really be talking about is the combination of what frequencies do I have available, then what technologies do I have available to use in that frequency.”
However, the speculation continued unabated. The vast majority of strategies, devices and services showcased at 3GSM seemed focused on DVB-H. Lagging behind in second place, primarily thanks to outspoken support from the FLO Forum and Qualcomm, was MediaFLO, which is currently trying to make headway into Europe on the back of trials of the technology with BSkyB.
While DVB-H pervaded the entire show, MediaFLO was buoyed by pockets of enthusiastic supporters. In the next 12 to 18 months, KDDI and Softbank in Japan will begin trials of MediaFLO. Over the same period, Verizon will roll out a MediaFLO-based service on CDMA, and AT&T-Cingular will launch the technology on GSM. The latter roll out will see handsets being made that incorporate the European standard, which is a red flag to a bull as far as MediaFLO proponents are concerned that see AT&T’s MediaFLO preference as the ultimate case study for Europe.
At 3GSM, Qualcomm and the FLO Forum announced the results of the second trial of the technology with BSkyB, carried out in Manchester. Omar Javaid, senior director of business development, Qualcomm MediaFLO, states that the results of the trial showed the MediaFLO physical layer performance ran around 4.5db better than its rival, DVB-H, which interprets to mean a MediaFLO network could be rolled out at cheaper cost or double the service offering when compared to DVB-H.
Kamil Grajski, president of the FLO Forum that today has over 70 industry members, said that the BSkyB trial proved that FLO outperformed DVB-H considerably. He adds: “FLO technology was able to support twice as many channels and had better channel switching speeds than DVB-H.”
Yet both DVB-H and MediaFLO run best in the UHF frequency. MacAvock states: “Everyone is talking about UHF, but analog TV is in that frequency, congesting the band. Digital TV will go in there as well, also congesting the spectrum until all analog TV is switched off, and now people are talking about putting mobile TV in UHF too.”
DVB-H and MediaFLO will also work in L-Band, however, which is a possibility for operators that want a more immediate solution to the lack of UHF. L-Band is going to be auctioned in the UK very soon, but MacAvock says L-Band will be more expensive to buy than DVB-H. He adds it is more suited to areas where broad coverage is not required, such as for bi-directional and point to point services.
S-Band is a possibility for those that are willing to wait until later this year to early 2008 for a terrestrial service for mobile TV that will become part of the fully fledged DVB-SH service in 2009. In 2009, Alcatel will launch a satellite that is currently being built. DVB-SH, which was approved by The DVB Steering Board on Valentine’s Day, uses line of sight to deliver IP-based media content and data to handheld devices. The terrestrial fillers will provide the missing coverage in highly populated areas where line of site fails.
Marketing positioning director in corporate marketing for the wireless group at Alcatel-Lucent, Denis Pagnac, states: “S-Band was freed at the time of the 3G auctions. Traditional DVB-H is based in lower frequency bands which are congested, so DVB-SH is being pushed by Alcatel because the bandwidth is free and the service will work across Europe. With one satellite you can cover a large number of people, cheaper than other mobile TV technologies.”
The last possibility for mobile TV being touted heavily at 3GSM was for UMTS operators across Europe, in the form of TDtv, which runs on an unused part of 3G spectrum, TDD, that most operators bought along with their 3G licences. TDtv comes from IPWireless’ UMTS TD-CDMA solution, put together with the 3GPP Release 6 multimedia broadcast and multicast services (MBMS), which operates in the universal unpaired 3G spectrum bands.
IPWireless spoke at the show about the results of a trial of TDtv in Bristol late last year. Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica and 3UK took part. Roger Quayle, co-founder and CTO of IPWireless, says that as a result of the trial, the operators saw that the technology can provide the same coverage as WDCMA, but on only 35% of WCDMA sites.
After discussions on technologies and frequencies waned, content became a strong topic of conversation at the show. While trials in the Uk tend to show that scheduled TV is on the money, at 3GSM made for mobile content hit the headlines.
Made for mobile TV made a big impression at the show, with the Sundance Film Institute showcasing several short films made specifically for the small screen by top directors with a penchant for the experimental. Each director or team was given $20,000 to produce their short, with the results ranging from the ‘home made’ style of the likes of Maria Maggenti’s (Puccini for Beginners 2006) Los Viajes De King Tiny with its flying dog, to the highly stylised and cool, as in Justin Lin’s (Tokyo Drift and Annapolis 2006) short, titled İLa Revolucion De Iguodala!
One team of film makers, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine 2006), commented at the show on creating their short, A Slip in Time: “This is a new medium, and it has its own challenges for the film maker. We’re in for new experiences with this screen size in mind, and this audience in mind.”
However, all the film makers agreed that made for mobile is not going to be solely the financial and creative jurisdiction of broadcasters and operators. With mobile content distributing over the airwaves with more freedom than data over the internet, directors predicted that home made film would make its mark. The exploitation of this imaginative streak is an open opportunity for creative mobile TV network operators.