Major Australian players are gearing up to compete in the mobile TV market, which is being reported more as a media play than a mobile technology play. Let’s start off with the spectrum auction (linked to in the heading), which has drawn flack because of the government’s decision to allow free-to-air operators to bid for one of the two licenses. There’s a lot of talk about the protection the free-to-air channels get and the weakening of the cross-media ownership laws. Newspaper group Fairfax described it as “a missed opportunity that will frustrate the emergence of new video players to provide new digital media services”. Mind you, each free-to-air channel only has one channel, and they’ll have 30 to fill…so they’re going to want content partners.
On to the technical details, the two channels auctioned will be:
“Channel A will support up to 15 in-home channels, targeted at special interest groups. For example, they could include shopping, religious, weather or government channels…Channel B could support up to 30 channels for a mobile phone or television in a train or tram, and the content restrictions are less severe. Likely bidders include Telstra, Fairfax, Macquarie Bank, News Limited and Foxtel.” Successful bidders will have 18 months to roll out the service. It’s not mentioned, but I’m pretty sure this will be a DVB-H service.
Meanwhile, The Australian reports that Telstra plans to offer a mobile TV service over its upcoming HSDPA network, a move which is claimed will “undermine the federal Government’s much-vaunted media reforms” and “severely crimp attempts by Communications Minister Helen Coonan to auction a band of digital spectrum for mobile TV services”…which I think is rubbish, it’s just likely to take Telstra (and by extension cable service Foxtel) out of the auction, but there’s plenty of other interested parties.
Anyway, Telstra’s offering will include up to 12 pay-TV channels including Sky News, Disney, TV1, Fox Sports, the Comedy Channel and the MTV music channel, for about AU$10 per month.
The funny thing is that this is Telstra’s new 3G network…as this article adequately details, three years ago Telstra paid $560 million for 50 per cent of Hutchison’s network specifically so it would have to build its own. The rationale was to avoid capital expenditure to keep the share price high, but the new CEO has no interest in keeping the share price high (which I think is a powerplay with the government, which owns 51%) and so is spending $1.1 billion on upgrading the network.
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