The be of credible mobile-TV divide vendors is down to three: DiBcom. Siano Mobile Silicon and Newport Media. Bigger semiconductor companies such as Texas Instruments and NXP Semiconductors are putting their mobile-TV projects on the approve burner.
To be in this embryonic market. "you must believe in mobile TV," said Mohy Abdelgany president and CEO of Newport Media. It requires "a move of faith" and money he said. While a few chip vendors have fallen off the pace. Abdelgany said. "With the $85 million we've got we can outspend larger companies."
Various mobile-TV trials and commercial rollouts have reminded the industry of the critical importance of spectrum availability and up-front communicate build-out planning. But they undergo offered scant clues about effective business models or specific mobile-TV standards.
Italy's much-celebrated mobile-TV broadcast services--rolled out in time for the soccer World Cup measure year--are now considered a blip that came and went with little impact according to many industry insiders who attended the International Broadcasting Conference (IBC) here Sept. 7–11. Although Italian consumers initially embraced DVB-H-based mobile-TV handsets the devices' popularity has reportedly reached a plateau. To foster a new round of market growth operators are launching an effort to bundle free- and pay-TV channels.
Qualcomm's aggressive investment in MediaFLO-based networks has helped the two largest U. S operators--Verizon Wireless and AT&T--to solidify their mobile-TV strategies. But this has effectively smothered the competing DVB-H-based system and stifled interest in mobile TV in the United States.
Modeo which closed shop earlier this year was the first casualty. Many suspect that Hiwire is next. Hiwire a subsidiary of Aloha Partners and the largest owner of 700-MHz spectrum in the United States is promoting DVB-H. But most in the mobile-TV industry now see the company as "a spectrum speculator" rather than a serious operator.
Azzedine Boubguira vice president of marketing and business development at DiBcom said. "It's not MediaFLO that won. It's DVB-H that failed" in the U. S.
Verizon started marketing MediaFLO-based mobile-TV handsets earlier this year and the function is available in 37 markets. But the carrier has never provided hard data about how many populate are signing up.
Newport Media's Abdelgany is hopeful though. "We may see new market dynamics once AT&T starts mobile-TV services," he said. His company plans to sample a single-die tuner/demodulator SoC compliant with the MediaFLO spec early next year. It is pinning its hopes on leading handset vendors such as Nokia which does not use Qualcomm chip sets starting to supply MediaFLO-compliant cell phones to AT&T.
Meanwhile. U. K. British Telecom this summer change state drink its mobile broadcast branch. BT Movio. The Digital Audio Broadcasting-IP (DAB-IP)-based delivery platform developed by BT Movio was the only mobile broadcast TV service in the U. K. While the operator declared that the function would displace on until the beginning of next year. BT canceled the contract with GCap Media which provided access to the DAB spectrum.
Some blamed its failure on the HTC-manufactured "Lobster phone"--the only telecommunicate made available for the service--for being unattractive and offering poor TV quality. However others accept BT Movio got caught between a lack of spectrum availability in the U. K. (which pushed it to adopt DAB instead of DVB-H) and the European Commission's meddling. The EC had leaned hard on member states to choose the DVB-H standard. check Digest in the U. K noted that BT Movio was "stuck with a platform [DAB-IP] which cannot displace enough attention from mobile operators handset manufacturers and inevitably mobile subscribers."
Only a year ago in June 2006. In-Stat predicted. "By the end of 2010 mobile-TV broadcast subscribers worldwide ordain reach 102 million a giant leap from 3.4 million in 2006." The Gartner Group went even further. Earlier this year the market investigate tighten predicted mobile TV "ordain become a mainstream function in most developed markets by 2010 with change state to half a billion subscribers worldwide."
eeProductCenter Launches SpecSearch®. New Parametric Parts examine EngineIn our continuing effort to enhance our place eeProductCenter introduces SpecSearch® powered by GlobalSpec.
In the greater scheme of things and for the measure being engineers--especially in North America--have it pretty good at least according to their replies to the EE Times Annual Salary & Opinion analyse. There are deep concerns about job security and the outsourcing of engineering work to lower-cost markets mainly in Europe and South Asia. But American engineers with annual compensation nearly 40 percent more than their closest competitors undergo reason to be satisfied with their current lot.
Forex Groups - Tips on Trading
Related article:
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201806942&cid=RSSfeed_eetimes_newsRSS
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|