The Australian Communications and Media Authority has said that several major Australian markets — including Sydney, Adelaide, Darwin, Illawarra, Newcastle, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast — will have poor reception for mobile TV services in some areas, but contrary to some media reports the service will be available. The problem is a technical one stemming from the fact that the ACMA expects mobile TV services to require more transmitters than other TV services because the receiving antennas are lower and smaller. “Those additional repeaters may present a potential source of interference to fixed reception analog and digital television services operating on adjacent spectrum, and their deployment may therefore need to be constrained by the need to protect operating or planned broadcasting services,” the ACMA wrote in a paper on the issue (PDF).
I spoke to Donald Robertson from the ACMA, who said this means that the people who get good reception from existing tv transmitters will get good reception from mobile TV service, but on the outer edges of the reception area the reception may fall away. TV broadcasters are currently required to broadcast their signal in both analogue and digital format (to allow consumers time to upgrade their TVs for the change-over) — this requirement will end between 2010 and 2012, at which time the spectrum will become less congested and the ACMA will look at ways to improve reception for mobile TV.
I think the big issue will come down to the boundaries of the good reception area for mobile TV… if it’s sufficiently large enough it shouldn’t deter many organizations from bidding to roll out the service. However, they’d have to make the limits clear — the whole point of broadcast mobile TV is to provide better signal quality than mobile TV over 3G networks — if the signal quality isn’t good customers are going to leave, as they are already doing in Europe.
Related stories:
–Australia’s Mobile TV Fight
–Telstra May Go For IPTV, Avoid Spectrum Auction
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post