Rivals race to bring Olympic Games to Mobile

An industry expert has said that the 2012 games will “do for mobile TV what the Coronation did for early television” – so says Phil Lehmann, senior product manager of T-Mobile (NYSE: DT)’s mobile TV division.

In the meanwhile, MNOs are deciding which Mobile TV techology to put their money and time behind. Part of that technology decision could be made next month, as I reported previously, with the auction of the “L-Band” spectrum – a possibe bearer for a Mobile TV service.

From the various Mobile TV technologies available, Orange and T-Mobile have instead put their weight behind TDtv (which uses multicast over 3GIP) – so much so that this summer they will start a pilot with 24 TV channels to 000’s of people in West Lonon. The two MNOs are partnering to spread the load on the costs side, and are potentially inviting other MNOs to join the party.

Anyway, back to spectrum auctions – after next month, there will be another two – with timescales dependent, at least for one on them, of the switch-off of Terrestrial Analogue TV. The general thinking is that a provider(s) would offer a DVB-H service in the freed up spectrum, but that need not necessarily be the case – other technologies such as MediaFLO (backed by Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM)), or something as leftfield as DAB-IP (which powered the short-lived Virgin TV service) could get a look-in.

Currently, most Mobile TV is provided by point-to-point 3G unicast streaming – offering video “On Demand”, but not using the available network resources very efficiently. TDtv, although running over 3GIP, would alleviate this issue as it is designed as a broadcast service (it uses 3GPP Release 6 Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS))

TDtv is developed by NextWave Wireless and uses TDD – which is a small chunk of spectrum given to four of the five operators when they aquired their 3G licenses back in 2000 (seems like such a long time ago!). There is a downside to this technology however, as it does not propagate very well in the lower bandwidths, such as those currently used by the Analogue TV services.

But there is of course another issue at hand here – how will MNOs monetize the service? Advertising is probably going to be the answer, at least partly, because multiple studies have found that a cost reduction in return for viewing Ads increases user uptake. It doesn’t seem especially revolutionary when you consider the model has been in place for many years with Terrestrial/Satellite TV, but, it may be the catalyst that drives wider market adoption – oh that, and the Olympics apparently – as proven by the likes of H3G and the Football World cup, major sporting events do attract that mass interest!

Let’s hope that whatever solution(s) end up being deployed, they give us great quality mobile programming on the go! If it does, I for one will certainly be signing up!

[Via: Times Online]