Summary
Broadcast TV Will Soon Compete With Telcos for Mobile Content Delivery
Analysis
This past January, the first on-the-road public demonstration of Advanced VSB (A-VSB), assured observers that the proposed ATSC transmission mode can provide broadcasters with DTV reception in moving vehicles at any legal speed. Riding in a specially equipped invitation-only demonstrator bus at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, a live demonstration showed rock-solid pictures even when the vehicle hit Las Vegas highway speeds.
The technology, developed by Samsung and Rohde & Schwarz, is now being standardized by ATSC, with field testing under way and a completed open standard targeted for the first half of 2007. Samsung expects that, with additional work on miniaturization of antennas and tuners, and power management, A-VSB will enable both portable and mobile digital TV reception direct from local TV stations.
LG and Harris last week also announced a new technology designed to extend ATSC over-the-air broadcast TV signals beyond fixed locations to mobile viewers. The new in-band mobile DTV technology, dubbed MPH™, for “Mobile-Pedestrian-Handheld,” makes its debut at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention April 14-19 in Las Vegas. The robustness and reliability of the new system will be showcased in live, mobile demonstrations throughout the NAB convention.
Will there be another “VHS-Beta” battle on the horizon? It all depends on the numbers. Both the LG and Samsung systems require a tradeoff between main and mobile stream payloads—and the latter stream requires a disproportionate amount of overhead in order to provide increased robustness. While each system offers backward-compatibility for non-enhanced receivers, it is likely to be economically unsound to incorporate both into a new receiver—and bandwidth prohibitive to broadcast both. And since licensing can involve a combination of royalty payments and cross-licensing agreements, the actual cost to a TV manufacturer is difficult to ascertain.
The chicken-and-egg situation muddies the picture of which system any broadcaster or manufacturer would wish to implement. Nonetheless, there is growing interest in providing video to handheld and mobile viewers, and that is likely to spur the rollout of one or both of these systems. Given the different business model for broadcast TV—and different service providers—it will be interesting to see how a service using A-VSB or MPH competes with other emerging services based on MHP or MediaFlo.
