[opendtv] Re: Mobile-TV IC market struggles to hold on
- From: "negrjp" <negrjp@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 06:50:40 -0300
Portables TVs is a marginal market after long years.
Somebody remember about two inches Sinclair or CASIO TVs ?
Where is TVs?
In my Country, Govenment plans use "the mobile slice spectrum of DTV" for low
cost and low definition SBTs manufactured in India, for 14" home TVs.
These small TV receivers represents 80% shared market.
This is "Brazilian Way"...
[s]
Jonas
deploy Open DTV in
> After initially appearing to dispel the excessive hype of the past few
> years, the article seems to fall back to the idea that mobile TV, as a
> separate subscrtiption service, might still be interesting to consumers.
>
> I've always had my doubts, but that's not to say that portable and even
> mobile reception of plain old DTT should be pursued.
>
> Bert
>
> -------------------------------------------
> Mobile-TV IC market struggles to hold on
>
> Junko Yoshida
> (09/17/2007 9:00 AM EDT)
> URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201806942
>
> Amsterdam, Netherlands - Suppliers of mobile-TV technology, waiting for
> the fledgling market to take wing, have already entered a race for
> survival.
>
> The number of credible mobile-TV chip vendors is down to three: DiBcom,
> Siano Mobile Silicon and Newport Media. Bigger semiconductor companies,
> such as Texas Instruments and NXP Semiconductors, are putting their
> mobile-TV projects on the back burner.
>
> To stay in this embryonic market, "you must believe in mobile TV," said
> Mohy Abdelgany, president and CEO of Newport Media. It requires "a leap
> of faith" and money, he said. While a few chip vendors have fallen off
> the pace, Abdelgany said, "With the $85 million we've got, we can
> outspend larger companies."
>
> But his company may be an anomaly.
>
> Various mobile-TV trials and commercial rollouts have reminded the
> industry of the critical importance of spectrum availability and
> up-front network build-out planning. But they have offered scant clues
> about effective business models or specific mobile-TV standards.
>
> Italy's much-celebrated mobile-TV broadcast services--rolled out in time
> for the soccer World Cup last year--are now considered a blip that came
> and went with little impact, according to many industry insiders who
> attended the International Broadcasting Conference (IBC) here Sept.
> 7-11. Although Italian consumers initially embraced DVB-H-based
> mobile-TV handsets, the devices' popularity has reportedly reached a
> plateau. To foster a new round of market growth, operators are launching
> an effort to bundle free- and pay-TV channels.
>
> Qualcomm's aggressive investment in MediaFLO-based networks has helped
> the two largest U.S. operators--Verizon Wireless and AT&T--to solidify
> their mobile-TV strategies. But this has effectively smothered the
> competing DVB-H-based system and stifled interest in mobile TV in the
> United States.
>
> Modeo, which closed shop earlier this year, was the first casualty. Many
> suspect that Hiwire is next. Hiwire, a subsidiary of Aloha Partners and
> the largest owner of 700-MHz spectrum in the United States, is promoting
> DVB-H. But most in the mobile-TV industry now see the company as "a
> spectrum speculator" rather than a serious operator.
>
> Azzedine Boubguira, vice president of marketing and business development
> at DiBcom, said, "It's not MediaFLO that won. It's DVB-H that failed" in
> the U.S.
>
> Verizon started marketing MediaFLO-based mobile-TV handsets earlier this
> year, and the service is available in 37 markets. But the carrier has
> never provided hard data about how many people are signing up.
>
> Newport Media's Abdelgany is hopeful, though. "We may see new market
> dynamics once AT&T starts mobile-TV services," he said. His company
> plans to sample a single-die tuner/demodulator SoC compliant with the
> MediaFLO spec early next year. It is pinning its hopes on leading
> handset vendors such as Nokia, which does not use Qualcomm chip sets,
> starting to supply MediaFLO-compliant cell phones to AT&T.
>
> Meanwhile, U.K. British Telecom this summer shut down its mobile
> broadcast branch, BT Movio. The Digital Audio Broadcasting-IP
> (DAB-IP)-based delivery platform developed by BT Movio was the only
> mobile broadcast TV service in the U.K. While the operator declared that
> the service would carry on until the beginning of next year, BT canceled
> the contract with GCap Media, which provided access to the DAB spectrum.
>
> Some blamed its failure on the HTC-manufactured "Lobster phone"--the
> only phone made available for the service--for being unattractive and
> offering poor TV quality. However, others believe BT Movio got caught
> between a lack of spectrum availability in the U.K. (which pushed it to
> adopt DAB instead of DVB-H) and the European Commission's meddling. The
> EC had leaned hard on member states to adopt the DVB-H standard. Screen
> Digest in the U.K. noted that BT Movio was "stuck with a platform
> [DAB-IP] which cannot draw enough attention from mobile operators,
> handset manufacturers and, inevitably, mobile subscribers."
>
> Resetting expectations
>
> Only a year ago, in June 2006, In-Stat predicted, "By the end of 2010,
> mobile-TV broadcast subscribers worldwide will reach 102 million, a
> giant leap from 3.4 million in 2006." The Gartner Group went even
> further. Earlier this year, the market research firm predicted mobile TV
> "will become a mainstream service in most developed markets by 2010 with
> close to half a billion subscribers worldwide."
>
> Gartner included TV service over cellular, which it forecast would grow
> from 38 million users in 2007 to 356 million in 2010. Meanwhile, the
> firm said that TV broadcasting would reach 133 million mobile
> subscribers by 2010, due in the main to the growing availability of
> broadcast-enabled phones. Japan, said Gartner, would lead the way,
> followed by Western Europe.
>
> Today, few people are talking about 100 million subscribers for 2010.
> Siano put the total of all mobile-TV broadcast subscribers in 2006 at
> only a few million. At best, Siano said, it might hit 20 million in
> 2007. Rick Doherty, president of Envisioneering Group, a Seaford,
> N.Y.-based technology assessment and research outfit, said, "Everyone is
> resetting their mo- bile-TV expectations."
>
> All the noise surrounding mobile-TV standards has only tended to make
> the market more chaotic. Philip Laven, former director of the technical
> department of the European Broadcasting Union, said in his lecture at
> IBC, "Advocates of the systems would like to persuade you that their
> system is the best. Don't believe people who are promoting it. None of
> them give a clear recommendation in favor of single system, because
> comparisons are difficult and quite complicated even for technical
> people."
>
> For example, spectral efficiency alone couldn't be a deciding factor,
> because operators tend to select lower data rates for better coverage.
> As for coverage reliability, while digital terrestrial TV networks
> deliver 18 to 24 Mbits/s to rooftop antennas, mobile-TV networks face
> more difficulties. "A built-in antenna for handheld devices is typically
> small and inefficient," Laven said. "[And] users want their handheld
> devices to work not only outdoors at ground level, but also indoors."
>
> In the final analysis, the issue is network cost. Different network
> topology is needed to deliver reliable mobile-TV services. This means
> building denser networks of lower-power transmitters.
>
> Many chip vendors are keenly aware of the network build-out obstacles.
> But the key issue, said Ronen Jashek, director of technical marketing
> and cofounder of Siano, is spectrum. Once spectrum was made available
> and allocated, the mobile-TV market quickly picked up, "as Korea, Italy
> and Japan have shown," Jashek said.
>
> Free-to-air myth
>
> Market watchers expect that about 7 million units of portable devices,
> capable of receiving Japan's free-to-air ISDB-T digital broadcast TV,
> will be sold this year in Japan alone. The number is expected to
> increase to 20 million next year, they said, mainly because of NTT
> Docomo's plan to equip nearly 50 percent of its hand- sets with ISDB-T
> 1-seg mobile TV reception capabilities.
>
> As one who views free-to-air as a trigger for mobile TV, Siano's Jashek
> noted that some 30 countries are already offering free-to-air
> broadcasting--both digital radio and TV. Korea also has 5 million
> subscribers to its T-DMB service, he said.
>
> But how many consumers are ready to buy subscription-based pay-mobile-TV
> packages on their handsets?
>
> As Gartner research director Carolina Milanesi sees it, "Uptake [of
> mobile TV] will not be driven by consumer demand so much as by operators
> including TV in basic bundles as a default service so that it appears
> free."
>
> DiBcom's Boubguira prescribed three steps for mobile TV growth:
> available spectrum, an effective business model and availability of
> low-cost phones.
>
> Mobile TV needs to become available not only in 3G phones but also in
> Edge phones, he said.
>
> In low-tech markets, said Boubguira, "you need a low-cost mobile-TV
> platform." DiBcom is working with its partners on such a platform.
>
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> reserved.
>
>
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