South Korea Sees Mobile TV Clearly

Since January, cell phone users in Seoul have been able to watch television on their cell phones through a government-subsidized technology called Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, or DMB.
South Koreans have become the first to be able to watch--free--mobile TV around the clock. While Americans and Japanese consumers can also watch TV on their cell phones, the images are not as clear.

Alcatel Satellite Mobile TV

The French telecommunications-equipment manufacturer proposes using the widely available S-Band frequency reserved for satellites to transmit broadcast signals both terrestrially and via satellite to mobile phones based on the DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld) standard, instead of the UHF band. The UHF band is typically used for TV transmissions in Europe but has little or no capacity to spare, said Herbert Mittermayr, vice president of marketing for mobile TV systems at Alcatel, in an interview last week at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.
Broadcast mobile TV phones receive regular TV broadcasts using special antennas. An alternative service, which is already available, streams video data to phones over mobile networks. The big difference is broadcast's one-to-many relationship versus a streamed transmission's one-to-one.
The Alcatel proposal calls for equipping base stations with S-Band repeaters and, in addition, using satellites capable of transmitting in the S-Band to deliver content to 3G (third-generation) phones enabled with DVB-H technology in three different ways: base-station streaming, base-station broadcasting and satellite broadcasting.
Each delivery service has its own advantages and disadvantages.
While the streamed service via the base station offers nearly unlimited channels and deep indoor coverage, it can support only a limited number of subscribers in a given area of the cellular network.
By comparison, the base-station broadcast service can support an unlimited audience with good indoor coverage but offers only 27 channels.
While the satellite-based broadcast service also can support an unlimited audience, especially in rural areas, it offers poor indoor coverage and only nine channels.
"Users don't have to worry about which service to select," said Mittermayr. "An intelligent content management system decides which of the three delivery channels is the most appropriate."
In addition to its availability, another key advantage of the S-Band is required antenna length. The frequency requires an antenna length of 6.5 centimeters, compared to UHF's 60 centimeters, according to Mittermayr.
The S-Band is a satellite allocation operating in the 2,170MHz - 2,220MHz frequency range, which is immediately adjacent to the 3G band.
Several companies are currently developing chipsets and handsets compliant with the S-Band, as well as designing antennas and other components, according to Alcatel.
Chip maker DiBcom is designing a new chipset that will be compatible with the DVB-H standard working in the S-Band, Alcatel said.
Sagem Communication is developing DVB-H phones that support both UHF and S-Band, according to Alcatel.

DVB-H will win mobile TV battle

A DIGITAL TV standard, DVB-H, will win out over rival technologies predicts a new report from Frost & Sullivan. "Even if it (DVB-H) is a few years down in line,” explains Frost & Sullivan ICT industry analyst, Pranab Mookken.
One of DVB-H's supposed advantages is its ability to backward integrate with its fixed terrestrial counterpart digital video broadcast-terrestrial (DVB-T), says Frost & Sullivan. The report does predict, however, that it will take until 2010 at least for the technology to cover most of Europe.
In the meantime, "broadcasters and operators may consider the use of DAB-IP and T-DMB delivery mechanisms for the interim period before the introduction of DVB-H," Mookken suggests. "Also, successful trials over DAB-IP and a readily available mobile TV packaged product from BT Movio could tempt operators to experiment with these alternatives."
In effect, the report is pretty dismissive of rival technologies like satellite-DMB (S-DMB) and terrestrial-digital media broadcast (T-DMB). It also doesn't think Qualcomm's MediaFLO will get very far.