[opendtv] Re: New mission: Adding digital TV to every portable screen
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:54:10 -0400
At 5:03 PM -0400 9/11/08, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:
From everything I've read in the past many years, I can't help but
believe that mobile TV might work okay ONLY IF it can be made part of
the standard OTA TV transmission package. It just seems like anytime
people try to create a separate network just for mobile reception, it
just doesn't hold its own. One wonders how many times this has to be
repeated before th hype subsides.
If it's true that TV to cell phones isn't the only or best way to offer
mobile TV, then that makes it even more viable to improve the receivers
and use the standard OTA signal.
It like a "Tale of Two Cities..."
Europe already had a viable Digital TV standard that could easily be
optimized for mobile reception ( e.g. Las Vegas 2000). They
mistakenly decided that they needed to enhance their standard to deal
with short term limitations in M/H receiver design, especially power
utilization.
The U.S. had a standard optimized for fixed receivers that offered
little hope of every being useful for M/H devices. Thus the effort
began to develop an M/H standard that could co-exist with 8-VSB.
In both cases the relentless march of technology overcame at least
some of these limitations.
In the U.S., 8-VSB was made to work via brute force application of
chip real estate to the problem - however, it is highly unlikely that
8-VSB can ever be expected to provide reliable M/H service.Thus the
new M/H standard may provide a path to serving the M/H market,
whatever it turns out to be.
In Europe DVB-T was also made to work better as receiver design
advanced. So much better that the ability to provide reliable M/H
service is now a commercial reality. The need for DVB-H was largely
eliminated because of advancements in other areas.
But there is still a universal problem - apparently nobody has a clue
as to what the public needs/wants from an M/H service, and the mobile
Internet is rapidly devaluing the entire M/H opportunity.
What we DO know is that consumers do not want another subscription TV
package that parallels what they are already paying for at home. A
variety of "by-pass" technologies make it very easy to move video
assets to M/H devices like the iPhone/Touch - what is even more
important in this respect is that the traditional TV broadcast
business model does not provide what consumers are looking for ,
especially during the critical weekday day parts - do you really want
to watch game shows, soap operas and Jerry Springer on an M/H device?
It is now easy to take prime-time fare, load it onto an M/H device
and enjoy "quality entertainment" at ANY time. I can't see this
changing unless broadcasters move away from their time and channel
programming mentality.
It is also clear that there are some opportunities to serve
traditional TV fare to M/H devices. At the top of the list is live
sporting events; success here will largely depend on greed. If
broadcasters can deliver live sports in the clear it may be enough to
drive a robust market for M/H devices; if it is a new premium service
all bets are off.
Next is news and weather. Unfortunately this audience is moving to
the Internet, even at home. I DO utilize my iPhone to access news and
weather information every day. The key here is that I can search for
exactly what I am looking for. Packaged TV programming that is not
available on demand falls far short of what I am looking for. This
could change if Broadcasters figure out how to deliver targeted
services to local cache so that these services are available
"on-demand." I believe that this may be the most important part of
the new ATSC M/H standard, but broadcasters will need to learn how to
use these new capabilities, and they must endure the process of
building a new service and developing an audience - in short this
will require considerable investment, something that many
broadcasters are unwilling or unable to do.
The most important take-away here is that this is NOT a "technology
problem." It is a business model problem that will require the
development of an entirely new service and the attendant investment
that goes along with building a new industry.
Regards
Craig
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