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Sci Tech
IT TRENDS
Television-on-the-go is here
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Mobile TV may soon be a new option for India’s 250 million cellular subscribers
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— PHOTO : BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Joint effort: Nokia has joined hands with Doordarshan to launch mobile TV trials in India.
Who would want to see movies, peering at a 4-inch screen? Four years ago it was a rhetorical question posed by sceptics who dismissed efforts to create a new broadcast standard to beam television content to handheld and portable devices. Today the question seems to have been unequivocally answered.
Price sensitive
A majority of mobile phone users — 84 per cent, to be exact — even in a price sensitive market like India, are interested in trying out mobile TV whenever it is offered and many are willing to invest in new handsets if their existing phones are not equipped to receive TV content. In fact, TV-on-the-go could attract something like 5 to 6 per cent of the total mobile subscriber base in India ( that means some 12 million customers) in the very first year of such an offering in India, says a recent report from Springboard Research.
That year is 2008. Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. (MTNL) the government-run telecom provider in Mumbai and Delhi, has already launched mobile TV services — albeit on a low key experimental basis; the offering is free to those who already subscribe to MTNL’s unlimited Rs. 349 per month plan and includes 7 channels.
Come April, MTNL is widely expected to formally launch the service across its telecom footprint, effectively taking India into the mobile television era.
The Springboard Research survey conducted across 6 cities also suggests that the mobile TV market in India, this year alone, is worth $ 360 million.
Another survey by Gartner projects 356 million mobile TV subscribers by 2010, compared to some 38 million world wide in 2007.
Recommendations
Meanwhile back home, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) placed on its website, www.trai.gov.in, a draft of its recommendations on how mobile TV services in India might be deployed, and has obtained the comments of many stakeholders.
It moots a new class of mobile TV licence to use broadcast delivery methods that are digital and also satisfy the standards laid down by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Two delivery options are suggested: the ultra high frequency or UHF band (585 MHz to 806 MHz) for terrestrial delivery or the S-band for delivery via satellite.
For mobile TV via the terrestrial route, two technologies compete: Digital Broadcast Video-Handheld (DV-H), an extension of DVB-T ( for terrestrial) which is being used to feed digital TV to desktop receivers and small semi portable sets and Media Forward Link Only (MediaFLO).
DVB is a consortium headquartered in Switzerland, of some 270 broadcasters, manufacturers, network operators and content providers in 35 countries. It claims that 170 million DVB receivers have already been deployed and span every continent. As you read this, the DVB World conference is going on in Budapest.
Portable devices
MediaFLO is a technology developed by Qualcomm, (the people who also created the CDMA mobile phone technology) to broadcast video and data to portable devices and it is being deployed mainly in the U.S. by Verizon, with AT&T expected to follow. Qualcomm recently showcased MediaFLO in Delhi and stated its intention of offering the technology in India once the government makes spectrum available.
Prasar Bharti joined hands with Nokia in 2007, to conduct the pilots of mobile television broadcasts in India, using the DVB-H technology. The company has already launched here, two handsets that can receive such broadcasts: the N77 and the N92. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month, Nokia unveiled yet another mobile TV compatible phone, the N96 as well as an interesting ‘bridging’ product: the SU33W Mobile TV receiver. This is an external Bluetooth ‘dongle’ with a built-in DVB-H antenna. It will extend the ability to receive TV to phones currently not equipped to do so… like Nokia’s own N73.
Cross-over solutions
Indeed if mobile TV is to attain the popularity everyone predicts, other handset makers too can be expected to offer cross-over solutions, enabling uses of legacy phones to plug in a device that will TV-enable them. Remember the first phone cameras were clip-ons! That still leaves the question, which technology will Indian users be offered to get their mobile TV feeds?
The TRAI document remains technology neutral and it remains to be seen if a single standard for this country emerges or whether, as in the case of CDMA and GSM, this will be a playground for competing standards, both competing for customers.
A third possibility is that as it happened in the Bluray versus HD DVD battle, one standard will be Last Man Standing.
And let us not forget the satellite route. In Barcelona, Alcatel-Lucent, with handset maker Sagem and satellite operator Eutelsat, demonstrated the world’s first-ever transmission of satellite mobile TV in the S Band, using the Digital Video Broadcast DVB-SH standard. Channels like CNBC, Nickleodeon and Canal 300 could be seen, via satellite, on a hand-held phone.
Nascent technology
This is still nascent technology but consider: we are already accustomed to satellite based direct-to-home television services. So it should not surprise us if it is extended to the mobile platform.
Which technology will ultimately dominate? It is really too soon to tell.
But TV on mobile devices is clearly here and the ability to receive it may make the mobile phone the third screen for televised content after the large home screen and the desktop computer monitor.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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