MOBILE TV STANDARDS - Size matters
The announcement earlier this year that the MediaFLO standard has been adopted by a major US
telecoms operator for mobile TV services has been greeted with disappointment by some European industry commentators and proponents of DVB-H. However, in a wider context the announcement can be seen as a boost for the whole mobile TV market and should pave the way for more widespread roll-outs of the mobile TV technologies in general. John Maguire discusses how regional, commercial and regulatory issues will influence the adoption of different standards and how open and proprietary standards can successfully co-exist
There is a fascinating battle for supremacy being played out across the globe as different mobile TV standards, both open and proprietary, vie for acceptance and market share. Currently there are three key players in this embryonic market: Representing the proprietary solution we have Qualcomm's MediaFLO end-to-end solution, which has launched in the United States. Representing the open standards are ISDB-T in Japan and DVB-H in Europe, both of which have fully rolled out, live services.
The key advantage that a proprietary system has in an early market is that it allows a single company or joint venture to deliver a single point, turnkey solution to a telco or broadcaster. In the case of MediaFLO, Qualcomm presented a compelling argument by offering a solution that was extremely quick and easy to deploy using existing infrastructure wherever possible. For the US operators that have adopted MediaFLO the opportunity to steal a march on the opposition by investing in an ‘off the peg' solution was too good to miss.
The disadvantage of the open standards approach is because it is fundamentally eco-system based, it is a collaborative approach with certain inherent disadvantages and at first sight the end result does not appear too appealing. There is a steeper leaning curve with an open standard, with more elements to plug together, and the need to drive interoperability and manage that Eco-System in order to find and develop the best in class suppliers across the value chain. However, increasingly organisations are willing to invest in a standards driven process because of the greater benefits over a proprietary solution in the long run. Open standards tend to be supported by a group of organisations, there are more companies involved, and consequently there is a bigger eco-system, which allows participants to drive down the price and to drive up the level of competition.
Another benefit of the open standards approach is that the cost of developing the Intellectual Property (IP) can be assessed and a single IP value fixed by the standards body, for instance MPEG LA. As the cost per handset for using a particular standard is set by an independent body, operators have clarity of cost prior to entering the market and can be confident that there will be little cost variation due to changes within that standard.
The role of government support for mobile TV is another interesting area. In countries where governments currently support either analogue or digital free to air TV there will soon be a watershed when the so call ‘digital dividend' becomes available and spectrum and frequency allocation is agreed for services such as mobile TV. Governments in countries such as the UK and Ireland have a mandate and arguably a social responsibility to provide free to air content broadcast to traditional TVs. The question that must be addressed very soon is how does mobile TV fit into this free to air model, and should the state funded broadcasters such the BBC and RTE be expected to extend their service to include hand-held devices?
If the answer is ‘yes' then a government is going to find it far easier politically to adopt an open standards based solution, which, by definition, can be serviced by any company with suitable knowledge and experience, rather than a proprietary solution. In fact, in Europe the first steps towards government acceptance of an open standard for mobile TV (in this case DVB-H) have been led by Viviane Reding Member of the European Commission responsible for Information Society and Media European Union, who has been extremely vocal about the need for Europe to work together and accept the open standard approach.
Another benefit of governmental support for open standards is that by deploying networks using compatible standards across multiple regions and in the longer term, multiple countries, not only are there benefits through volumes of scale, but there is also the opportunity to develop roaming capabilities. For mobile TV, deployment of a proprietary standard would not allow this and would lead to more market fragmentation than an open standards approach could potentially deliver. For example, if MediaFLO or a similar proprietary standard gained a foothold in Europe, it might be successful in one or two countries, but there would be little chance of Pan-European organic growth. On the other hand, an open standard such as DVB-H has a far higher chance of widespread success in Europe as there are far fewer barriers to its adoption. In fact, the rollout of DVB-H services is likely to cause a snowball effect in opening up new business models and extra revenue channels for roaming. Roaming for mobile TV is not as important as for multi cast or unicast TV, but an open standards approach is typically the desired strategy. Hence all the major mobile operators are looking for well defined interfaces, not proprietary standards, so that they can choose best in class.
However in the face of all logic indicating that open standards are the way forwards, the success of MediaFLO in the US demonstrates exactly what a clever business case Qualcomm have developed. MediaFLO put together an end-to-end system designed specifically for the US market and, in order to demonstrate the suitability of the concept, went as far as sourcing and licensing the content. Qualcomm were then able to approach operators and offer a complete working solution that could be rolled out in a very short period of time. However once MediaFLO had been demonstrated ‘in the field', Qualcomm took it to the US standardisation body with the aim of having it adopted because even MediaFLO recognises that the only way to drive the business globally is to have it as a worldwide standard.
However, arguably it is the size of the market that is far more important than which standard is being used, certainly in the short term, and consequently it is interesting to consider the levels of penetration that the commercially available mobile TV networks achieved. When the Japanese government took the decision to launch an ISDB-T service, it first secured a mandate to proceed and positive endorsement of the standard from all of the mobile operators. By securing buy-in from all the major players in the Japanese mobile TV market to contribute to the standard and to develop devices based on it, the government ensured that after one year of operation, the service was available to 70 per cent of the Japanese population. Of these potential users, 10 per cent were actually using the mobile TV service. In the case of 3 Italia with its DVB-H (H3G) network, after one year of operation, 800,000 of the available 8 million subscribers were using the mobile TV service. So, interestingly, in both markets, open standards hit 10 per cent of the available population. In the USA, despite Qualcomm's best attempts to make mobile TV accessible, the proprietary MediaFLO networks have reportedly shipped around less than 1 million devices after about a year of operation, which is well down in percentage terms compared with the comparable Italian and Japanese networks. The USA is a very big, very fragmented market, but not surprisingly there is an ongoing debate as to whether the slow take-up of mobile TV can be attributed to geography, the standard or perhaps external economical factors.
Another more divisive question that is being asked is ‘can mobile TV be a compelling enough offering to drive volumes'? The answer to this is certainly ‘Yes', but with a number of minor caveats. Evidence from the many mobile TV trials across the world indicate that users will adopt mobile TV, but they expect high quality audio and video as a given. Users are also becoming more sophisticated thanks to the ever increasing range of content delivered in both linear and non-linear formats to PC and television screens. To be successful, a mobile TV services will need to offer a range of high quality content delivered as linear TV, video on demand TV, and even audio and video downloads, not just broadcast TV on a smaller screen. The success of the video ipod and the iphone demonstrates the value of downloadable content and Nokia are currently rolling out YouTube mobile in a similar vein. The technology to allow unicast, multicast and broadcast delivery is already available and is still improving. Each iteration of improvement will provide mobile operators and device manufacturers with the tools to make mobile TV more desirable to the market. However, in order to reach ubiquity, there needs to be a large degree of interoperability and certainly a collaborative approach throughout the sector. Some form of open standards approach would certainly make this process of growth and integration far quicker, easier and more successful. However in order to ensure that the proposed standard is developed and used to the benefit of the whole sector it would be beneficial to have strong, impartial stewardship. Industry bodies such as the OMA and BMCO forum are taking up that mantle and are driving open standards forward and help to ensure that the right tool sets are developed in order to deploy a system and provide clarity of cost, benefits and issues for potential users. The importance and value of proving clear business guidance to potential mobile TV operators through the availability of information regarding capex, opex, and potential revenues will help bring new players into the sector and help the whole industry in the longer term by helping increase volume.
The other issue that must be considered is that all the discussion about standards is currently focussed on the generic mobile TV service. Of course, once that open platform is available, there is significant scope for operators to develop and deliver proprietary services based on those open standards. This second stage development will give network operators and device manufactures the opportunity to innovate, build their individual business cases and differentiate their offerings once the basics are in place.
In essence, the most important issue for any company involved in the mobile TV market is to ensure that their business and technology planning is focussed on the medium to long term and the importance of the inter-operability that will certainly be required to make mobile TV a global success. There might be the temptation to roll-out a proprietary solution in order to kick-start their service and provide improved short term revenue, but as the market develops, the benefit of having 10 per cent of potential subscribers locked in, might switch to become the problem of having 90 per cent of potential subscribers locked out. While the size of the market is intrinsically more important than the standards being used, the paradox is that choosing an open standard will potentially help the market develop to its full potential while use of a proprietary standard could lead to fragmentation. Given the choice, I believe that open standards will provide the best opportunities for the mobile TV sector, as they drive and promote interoperability and best in class solutions across the value chain. Open standards also drive competition which fundamentally drives economies of scale and enables device manufacturers to make large scale solutions which proprietary systems don't. Either way, it is important to take a pragmatic view at this stage of mobile TV's development, and as new services are rolled out, more handsets will become available and the potential viewing population will increase. Long may this continue!
John Maguire is General Manager Consumer Mobile at Silicon & Software Systems (S3)
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