Mobile operators have set their sights on mobile TV, rolling out their own services with partners like MediaFLO. But a number of vendors are looking to offer other solutions, such as using local TV broadcasters’ digital spectrum. Late last week, LG (SEO: 066570) announced a technology it’s pushing, called MPH; today at CES, a Samsung-led alliance using a similar, but incompatible technology, called Advanced Vestigial Sideband (A-VSB), talked up its plans. The group says it will begin tests later this year using mobile handsets, handheld TVs and other devices, with a view to 2009 commercial launches.
A-VSB uses spare spectrum in local broadcasters’ digital spectrum, and the A-VSB alliance hopes to aggregate the leftovers from different broadcasters in each local market, then use it to offer mobile TV service that combines both national feeds and content from local broadcasters. It’s assembled a number of players that will bring together difference pieces of the puzzle: Samsung will supply receivers and devices; SES Americom will deliver national content to local transmission points via its network; Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Siemens Networks will supply the service delivery and subscriber management system; Rohde & Schwarz will provide transmission gear to local broadcasters; MobiTV will create interactive applications and services that will come over a broadband backchannel.
The A-VSB group is focusing on technical issues for the time being, but like with so many other mobile TV platforms, those aren’t as big a concern as commercial issues — particularly since these companies want to offer interactive services, which would require some sort of mobile data connection from a mobile operator. The companies in the alliance stressed that they view services using their technology as complementary to mobile operators’ other mobile TV efforts, and added that there could be different subscription and billing models (ie both free and paid services).
“You could see MediaFLO as cable,” said John Godfrey, VP of government and public affairs at Samsung, “and A-VSB as the local channels.” That comparison is easy to see, but it’s not clear operators will take the same view, particularly when it comes to subsidizing handsets that can access free services that compete with their paid ones. However, few would argue with the success of the free, ad-supported TV model alongside the paid one — at least in the living room — so such a hybrid model could work in mobile as well.
They hybrid model also offers some other benefits, which the A-VSB backers were keen to stress: the ability to offer localized content as well as national, and the ability to put popular programming on broadcast technologies not constrained by capacity limits, and leave less popular programming to unicast or multicast data networks.
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