Media sector analyst briefing - 19th September 2007 | Ofcom

Media sector analyst briefing - 19th September 2007 | Ofcom

BT ditches mobile TV service -

"BT can confirm that following a review of its wholesale solutions, the decision has been made not to continue with the Movio service," a statement from the company said on Thursday. "BT is discussing the timescale for the closure of the service with Virgin Mobile. While the feedback from users on the service has been complimentary, Movio sales have been slower than originally expected mainly due to a lack of compatible devices from the big brands. This in turn has been caused by the fragmented nature of the mobile TV market and hesitancy on the part of the main network operators as they seek to fill their own largely under-utilised 3G networks."

Crown Castle bails from mobile TV effort, Modeo’s fate unclear :: RCR Wireless News

Europe goes one way-the US another, all over again?

EU backs standard for mobile TV

Telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding has called on member states to roll out services using the DVB-H standard "as quickly as possible".

Some key players have questioned why Brussels rather than the market is deciding what the standard should be.

The Flo Forum says:

Regarding FLO technology, “recent independent trials of FLO technology in the UK involving several EU-based FLO Forum members highlighted significant technical advantages, which lead to savings on infrastructure spending. FLO offers twice the capacity of DVB-H, or alternatively the same capacity, but with a network build out with significantly reduced cost. This can translate into millions of euros difference in capital and operating expenditures for a network.“

"Technology selection is not an appropriate regulatory tool in innovative and dynamic markets such as mobile TV, especially where the market remains undecided and where the technology continues to evolve rapidly."

ROK is Rolling

Rok is about to take the mobile TV market by storm.It has built up a technical capability with 43 patents applied for to be able to provide reasonable quality TV services to a mobile handset (some at 24 fps) using GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi and upcoming mobile technologies. Its mobile client supports Symbian, Java and Windows 5 with streamed video content which it also aggregates and supplies to mobile operators.

It has three routes to market:

• Complete turnkey white label service to operators. Currently it has 30 licensees each which could acquire 150, 000 subscribers in the first 12 months of service. It expects another 30 by the end of 2008 giving it a potential market of 4.5 million in 2007, 10 million in 2008 and 20 million in 2009. Typical monthly subscriptions run at $8 giving a gross revenue of $80 million per month in 2008.
  
• It has a new partnership with Nokia which will embed the E-series smart phone with its TV software. This is aimed at the business market and will bundle business content with a monthly subscription payable to Rok. It expects some 9 million subscribers over 3 years paying a few dollars a month for content.
• A free service which will be funded by advertising which will be announced shortly. This will have different content to distinguish it from the other services.

The company is looking at other services including video conferencing, VoIP and SIP services for the future, all targeting 3 billion 2G customers.

Orange France adds seven channels

The French mobile operator Orange has added seven new live TV channels to its TV on mobile service, Orange World, bringing the total number to 60 channels.

The new additions to the service, which also features 3,000 videoclips, are the sports channels Eurosport and Eurosport 2, TMC, NT1 Remix, a mobile version of the NT1 channel, Jet (the first TV channel totally dedicated to TV games), Olympique de Marseille football team’s OMTV and children’s channel Gulli.

At the end of 2006 the operator had over 2 million subscribers to its mobile TV service.

New broadcast coalition could threaten entrenched mobile TV players :: RCR Wireless News

Rather than ceding control of the mobile TV market to the nation’s wireless carriers, nine U.S. television broadcast groups have formed an industry alliance called the Open Mobile Video Coalition to speed the development of a mobile variant for digital broadcast TV.

The broadcasters, which combined own 281 television stations in 110 U.S. markets, made the announcement from Las Vegas in conjunction with the National Association of Broadcasters 2007 show, which starts there today.

The coalition’s aim is to realize the “full potential” of digital broadcast television spectrum in the United States. The spectrum is currently used for stationary TVs, and the current technology does not lend itself to mobile applications. The coalition hopes to rally support around one of the recently announced technologies that will allow local digital TV broadcasters to beam their offerings to portable devices like cellphones.

Does anyone care about high definition?

While annual cinema admissions in the UK grew steadily from 1984 until 2002, these figures have stagnated at around 167 million admissions per year over the last few years, according to the UK Film Council.

By contrast, the number of low picture quality videos watched on the internet has exploded over the last two years thanks to websites such as YouTube. Although precise figures are not available, on average an estimated 100 million videos are streamed off the site and more than 65,000 new videos are added every day.

Live Mobile TV Good But Not Great

Third Screen: Live Mobile TV Good But Not Great

A mixed review for MediaFLO from Verizon.

Japanese study shows encouraging signs for mobile TV

A survey based on more than 3,000 Japanese consumers howed that while only 41% of respondents said that they intended to use mobile broadcast services, the number doubled to 83% among focus group testers who were able to try out the service.

MPEG-4

Coding Technologies, a provider of audio compression technology for digital broadcasting, mobile music and the Internet, has announced that Motorola has entered into a patent license agreement with the company. Coding
Technologies is the developer of the MPEG-4 aacPlus audio codec.
Motorola joins a number of the world's wireless device
manufacturers, including Nokia, SonyEricsson and LG as a licensee of aacPlus.

Spanish Mobile TV

In an attempt to speed up the launch of DVB-H mobile TV, the Ministry of Industry has opened public consultations with all key players involved in the market up to next April 26 aimed at laying the groundwork for the launch of the service by year end.

BBC launches mobile TV trial

The BBC has revealed plans to offer a range of TV and radio networks to 3G mobile phones. The trial, scheduled to run for up to 12 months, will run on the Orange, Vodafone and 3 mobile networks. Significantly O2, which has been involved in a series of DVB-H mobile TV trials, is not included in the trial.

Channels featured will be BBC One, BBC News 24 and BBC Three, though some sports content will not be included. Eight radio stations will also be included: Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 6 Music, BBC 7 and Asian Network. Missing is the BBC’s news and sports station Radio 5 Live. The trial will get underway within a month.

Channels including Sky News and Sky Sports News are already streamed live on UK 3G networks. (JC)

WIMAX HDTV MOBILE TV JRC and Runcom Completed the Development of Mobile WiMAX Base Station - Assodigitale - Associazione Italiana Operatori Industria

"Running a High Definition TV application over a Mobile WiMAX Network enabled us to demonstrate the fantastic potential of Mobile WiMAX as a Broadband Access Technology" said Israel Koffman, Runcom's VP of Marketing; "The collaboration with a leading company in radio technology such as JRC enabled the team to bring OFDMA technology to perform one of its highest records."

Alvarion Partners with NDS and MobiTV to Demo Mobile Wimax TV

"Our companies are cooperating in order to demonstrate mobile TV over WiMAX anytime, anywhere and on any device," said Joseph Deutsch, VP Product Marketing, NDS. "Alvarion's 4Motion solution, together with our core VideoGuard CA and DRM solution, supports the full range of video services, giving carriers the assurance that only paying subscribers gain access to content while offering various business models to consumers and increasing average revenues per user (ARPU)."

Spectrum Key To The Development Of Mobile TV In Europe

Europe : Mobile network operators in Europe called for more spectrum to be made available for the provision of mobile television, echoing one of the findings in the final report of the European Mobile Broadcasting Council (EMBC), an initiative of the European Commission. While the EMBC report highlights the great variety of technical solutions to the provision of mobile broadcast services, such as 3G network-based video streaming, MBMS and DVB-H, DMB and satellite broadcast solutions, it notes that a lack of spectrum could limit the development of some of the new mobile TV platforms available.

Mobile TV warned to standardise

EC telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding said that if the industry did not agree on one, she would do it for them.

Ms Reding warned that Europe risked losing a chance to be a global player in the burgeoning mobile TV market.

She made her comments during a speech to delegates at the Cebit technology fair in Hanover, Germany.

Large-scale trials of TV on mobile handsets are already happening across the world as phone firms try to find out if consumers want to watch programmes on the go.

This comes as a surprise to no one!

"Audiovisual without Frontiers" Directive

The Commission unveiled on 9 March a consolidated text of the modernised "Television without Frontiers" Directive. After a first reading in the European Parliament and the Council, there is now broad agreement with the Commission about the future legal framework for Europe's audiovisual sector. The new rules, which have been called for especially by the European Parliament, are a response to technological developments and create a new level-playing field in Europe for emerging audiovisual media services (video on demand, mobile TV, audiovisual services on digital TV). European TV- and filmmakers will be given more flexibility to produce digital content which they can then make freely available to consumers thanks to advertising. The new Directive reaffirms the pillars of Europe's audiovisual model, which are cultural diversity, protection of minors, consumer protection, media pluralism, and the fight against racial and religious hatred,. The Commission also proposes to ensure the independence of national media regulators. The consolidated text of the new Directive will now go into a second reading by the European Parliament and Council.

No hurry on mobile TV, says Telstra (, MARCH 07, 2007)

TELSTRA says it is no hurry to jump on the mobile television bandwagon just yet, as it adopts a wait-and-see stance to the new broadcasting technology.

The standard known as digital video broadcasting handheld (DVB-H) has been tested in a number of markets around the world - including Australia - with commercial services recently launched in Albania, Italy and Vietnam.

Dump the TV set, watch the web instead - tech - 03 March 2007 - New Scientist Tech

WATCHING programmes on your television set is so last century.

Television studios are increasingly using the net to transmit their programmes to viewers on demand.

While this is fine when a relatively small number of people are downloading files at different times, if the internet were to transmit live television broadcasts to millions of viewers simultaneously, the sudden demand for bandwidth could create a huge bottleneck.

Now a British company has developed a way to send live video to millions of computers at once without overloading the web. The system, called the Live Delivery Network, will be launched next month by London-based firm Skinkers. It uses Pastry, a peer-to-peer distribution tool developed by Microsoft to transmit the broadcasts. This means every user who receives the broadcast also passes parts of the file on to other users. In this way live video feeds, which eat up bandwidth, can be distributed to millions of users without putting impossible demands on a central server.