Analysis: Chips Are In Place For Mobile TelevisionAnalysis: Chips Are In Place For Mobile Television

LONDON — 2005 has been a year of mixed signals and blurred pictures as we make our way towards delivering moving video to mobile handsets and lightweight computers. The technology has been touted as the next killer application and one that could drive the mobile phone industry with a whole new generation of baseband chips and modulators and smarter, larger and lower-power displays.

But it is now looking the industry must wait until 2007 for a major ramp of the market. Mobile TV has particular appeal to many industry players because it holds out the promise of taking the western hemisphere back towards competition on function and service rather than on price. Many companies are becoming tired of fighting for market share in a market where the margins have become wafer thin.

So taking prices on goods and services up and margins with them has great appeal. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is not turning out to be quite as straightforward as some had envisaged.

The fault certainly does not lie with the semiconductor supply chain, with established companies such as Philips Semiconductors, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Texas Instruments Inc. busy readying multi-standard digital TV receivers, and to some extent being overshadowed by announcements from a host of startups that are focusing on delivering either in-house developed integrated chipsets or just the baseband, with the tuner coming through partnerships with established suppliers.

The start-ups include such companies as France’s DiBcom, Israel-based Siano Mobile Silicon and Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) chip specialist Frontier Silicon Ltd., which is beginning to diversify into the mobile TV sector.

The year also started promisingly, with a special session on integrated chipsets and tuners for mobile TV applications at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where the buzz was both audible and visible.

Yet a recent report from Sweden, a country where cell phone market penetration exceeds 110 percent and 3G networks already cover well over 90 percent of the geography, the launch of mobile TV is proving to be a political and regulatory nightmare.

It has got bogged down as broadcasters have lined up against mobile operators, and because of regulators facing huge pressure to revise — or not to revise — their plans for the digital TV spectrum. The country is typical of several others where the important decision on spectrum allocation for mobile TV broadcast has been delayed. Consequently, while there are trials-a-plenty, these countries are still scrambling to make an intelligent choice on the most appropriate technology to deploy.

A parallel dilemma is the choice between Digital Video Broadcast- Handheld (DVB-H) over a separate mobile-TV broadcast network, and Mobile Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS) over the 3G network. Elsewhere, there is no such reticence. Finland, whose government has settled on mobile-TV broadcasting on its UHF spectrum, late November closed the initial deadline for applicants offering mobile-TV service. Four candidates have emerged.

In the U.S., Crown Castle International Corp., which acquired exclusive terrestrial rights to 5-MHz of L-band spectrum throughout the country, has completed DVB-H network technology testing and is poised for consumer trials. The operator will be up against MediaFLO, a subsidiary of Qualcomm, which is planning to invest $800 million over the next few years building a mobile multicasting network based on its Forward Link Only (FLO) technology using the 700-MHz spectrum it acquired in an auction last year.

The Crown Castle network is set to operate in the 1,670-MHz to 1,675-MHz band. The company has been conducting a technology trial in Pittsburgh for most of this year. “We're probably the furthest along in terms of getting a DVB-H network up and deploying services,” said Michael Ramke, vice president of business development for Crown Castle Mobile Media.

Also in November, South Korea launched the world's first commercial mobile-TV, -radio and -multimedia services based on the Digital Multimedia Broadcasting standard, which is part of the DAB platform.

The silicon providers are enthusiastic about the opportunities, and most handset makers have designs in the pipeline or already being tested.

As Alon Ironi, chief executive of Siano Mobile Silicon commented: “A lot of the top-tier companies are starting their [mobile-TV handset] designs now for the second half of 2006. Next year is mainly about pilots; 2007 will be the real ramp of the market.”

Another of the start-ups, French fabless group DiBcom, was the first to demonstrate working silicon for mobile TV modulation, in a PDA. It chose the 3GSM Congress, in Cannes, to do so. During the year, Intel Capital participated in the French company’s latest venture round. UMC, which makes the chips, also participated in the round.

By aligning itself with Intel, DiBcom is expected, in the near term, to get a substantial advantage over its competitors in the portable digital TV/PC market. DiBcom CEO Yannick Levy is predicting that almost all laptop PCs will have digital TV reception capabilities by 2008.

On the handsets side, and to no-one’s surprise, Nokia put an early stake in the ground in November as revealed details of the N92 phone, tailored for the frequencies used in Europe for the DVB-H standard. The handset's 2.8-inch display twists, so that the device can sit on a table like a portable DVD player, act like a handheld video camera with LCD viewfinder or take the familiar form of a clamshell phone.

The phone is specified to deliver four hours of TV watch time using a lithium-polymer battery. However, Nokia gave scant details about the internals of the phone, which will not ship until about June 2006. Juha Lipiainen, a director for multimedia strategy and business development at Nokia, said the company is not ready to disclose its plans for how many mobile-TV phones it will release. “Mobile TV is so new we don’t have a sense of how users will adopt it. We are taking the same view [of mobile TV] as we did the camera, e-mail and SMS. We intend to implant it in different products over time. The issue is how to economically encapsulate the mobile TV capability in hardware,” he added.

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