New Communication on Mobile TV
EUROPE - The European Commission has just published a communication on Mobile TV in anticipation of this becoming a major new business area.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of this is the Commission’s support for DVB-H as a common EU standard. While they are not immediately mandating its use, they say that they may seek to do so in future. This seems to run counter to their general policy position of promoting technology neutrality when it comes to spectrum allocation.
This subject was debated at a very good recent workshop run by the Portuguese telecoms regulator Anacom. Speakers, including some involved closely with the development of DVB-H, gave presentations on a range of aspects of the development of Mobile TV. The clear consensus view from this workshop was that mandating DVB-H would be a mistake, especially given the fact that both technology and business models are evolving very rapidly.
Posted by Richard Allan at 02:03PM PST
Amitabh Kumar Aug 27, 2007
Recognition of a single standard i.e. DVB-H was on the expected lines, but presents an over simplification of the real world. The fact is that the newly developing technologies such as WiMAX make streaming TV available anywhere with a single standard, multicast or unicast.
The problem of Mobile TV has been owing to the handset manufacturers getting seriously involved with standards and not really focusing on multistandard handsets.
Amitabh Kumar