MDA Moves Roadmap Along With Reference Documents

The Mobile DTV Alliance will release implementation guidelines for DVB-H on Wednesday at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment.

DVB-H is one of two standards used to build two-way mobile broadcast networks as an overlay to existing 3G networks. The idea is to offload capacity restraints for operators in the event of mass adoption of mobile TV, while improving the economic case by moving from a unicast one-to-one connection paradigm with subscribers to a broadcast, one-to-many scheme. The other standard is FLO.

The MDA is a consortium of vendors like Texas Instruments, Intel Corp., Motorola Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others that want to present operators with an interoperable package of infrastructure solutions for DVB-H, while giving them clear reference guidelines for everything from DRM and content formatting to service activation and tower issues like planning for frequency and density. The latter guidelines are what are planned for release tomorrow.

A set of interoperability guidelines will appear Dec. 12, with plugfests expected to be announced soon.

Yoram Solomon, president and chairman of the board at the MDA said today at a press event the goal is to address the gamut of usage profiles for DVB-H. “There are multiple scenarios in the implementation guidelines,” he said, “to support whichever technologies and business models carriers wish to employ.”

Boosters say DVB-H improves the proposition for mobile TV by making it compelling enough for subscribers to pay $20 extra for the service.

“This is a natural extension of IPTV,” said Solomon. “But it will be two-minute increments so to make it worthwhile DVB-H can offer things like relevant ads with click-to-buy capabilities.” Other features include recording , program alerts and other aspects.

“It needs to be great content and an easy to use service, to make it a lean-in TV experience, not a Web surfing experience,” said Mike Ramke, vice president at service provider Modeo LLC, which is building out a DVB-H network and aggregating content in the United States in the 1600 band, with plans to wholesale the service to mobile carriers when the service launches next year. “It also has to be available on a large number of devices,” he added.

Those devices will contain multimode chips to support different encoding, DRMs, frequencies and wireless technologies without significant penalties; the unoptimized battery life for DVB-H handsets is around two or three hours, Ramke said, but the MDA has a goal of four hours.

Will the public go for it? Solomon said, yes. “If you ask subscribers if they are willing to pay $20 per month to see full broadcast video, you’ll get around 5 to 11 percent to sign up,” he noted. “But if you give them the handset for one, two, three months and they actually see it, the case changes radically in favor of mass adoption.”

Ramke said that in pilots, Modeo was finding the "appointment TV phenomenon," with people regularly using the service at lunch or during commutes.

Mobile DTV Alliance www.mdtvalliance.org
Modeo LLC www.modeo.com

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