Another ones bites the dust – well that’s my thinking anyway, since it really isn’t going to be too long before all DVB-H services are switched off, or marginalised to the point of irrelevance. Case in point: Swisscom, who have replaced their DVB-H service (as reported by Broadband TV News) with one using packet-switched data. The apparent reason for the marginalisation of the DVB-H version of the service was the lack of devices – and I can believe that too, there’s been a real dearth of devices support the Broadcast Mobile TV standard of late. So, ‘Swisscom TV air’, as it is called, will now primarily use HSPA/UMTS/EDGE to run, with the DVB-H network staying on in the background.
But the bigger story here, in my view, is the failure of DVB-H to make an impact in the market, despite being backed by some big names – most notably on the handset side, by Nokia (remember the N96? That was packing a DVB-H chip). What was the reason for failure? Well, commercially there was always a rather hazy business model, with the usual suspect(s) of advertising being touted as the solution. But technically there was a bigger issue (which also translated ultimately to a commercial one): you would need to roll out an entire new network infrastructure to support DVB-H broadcast – and that was too major of an undertaking for most players involved.
That, along with the fact that 3G data speeds suddenly started to shoot up (with the likes of HSPA and so on), and suddenly the lack of handsets made DVB-H seem very unattractive. Some countries persevered (Italy, notably), but overall DVB-H hasn’t worked out like expected. Swisscom’s new service seems much more in line with how we expect Mobile TV to evolve going forward – but as always, we need to wait for things to pan out before we can fully assess how successful it is.