NAB 2010 to Showcase Mobile DTV Marketplace!
As companies get ready to showcase products for NAB 2010 ( April 10-15, Las Vegas), mobile TV is set to show its most spectacular face ever at this premium broadcaster event. There are many reasons for this.
The FLO TV Service, based on MediaFLO technology has now expanded countrywide after spectrum became available in July 2009 following the DTV transition. This has enabled it to expand its footprint in additional markets and cover the whole of United States. It has a host of new receiver devices which will complement its offering, both via the mobile operators i.e. Verizon Wireless and AT&T as well as via FLO TV. This includes handheld MediaFLO receivers which can be bought by users without being linked to a mobile phone.
However the greatest action awaits in the arena of AT&T Mobile DTV for which the recommendations were finally approved in Oct 2009. This NAB is the first major broadcast show to feature new devices and products which follow the ATSC Mobile DTV standards and will form the basis of strong rollouts in 2010 through 2011.In fact the open mobile video coalition ( OMVC), an association of over 800 broadcast stations, which has been the prime mover for the ATSC M/H standards ( now named as ATSC Mobile DTV), together with NAB and product manufacturers is showcasing a Mobile DTV Market Place. The marketplace is also being supported by the consumer electronics association (CEA).The importance of the ATSC DTV marketplace can be gauged from the fact that it is being held at a place no less prominent than the grand lobby of the Las Vegas Convention Centre. What do you need for Mobile DTV to be more prominent?
The strong point of the ATSC Mobile DTV technology is the ability to provide local TV station channels available for mobile devices complete with features such as power saving, mobility and robust reception capabilities. A result of nearly five years of development and drawing from multiple technologies, the standards for ATSC mobile STV now provide an ability to add mobile DTV transmissions at local TV stations without affecting the standard DTV receivers or the need for large capital investments which go in building independent mobile DTV networks.
Most of the ATSC based mobile DTV transmissions will enable broadcasters to provide mobile targeted transmissions many of which will be free to air. This is considered in the industry to be one of the key factors for success as it enables a majority of handsets to be manufactured with tuners inbuilt as a default, rather than customers having to buy a anew handset just to watch mobile DTV.
The technology has already been demonstrated in cooperation with Sprint using Samsung Moment handsets and will now be featured as a ready to go products. The ATSC mobile DTV, is now set to roll out strongly in 2010. It has been a while since the AT&T mobile TV services were launched as also of Verizon based on FLO technology. Since then this broadcast based technology (FLO) has expanded to all markets in USA. However it is set to meet its match in the ATSC mobile DTV which is backed by the open mobile video coalition ( OMVC) and over 800 broadcast stations. It turns out that Sprint is the first new partner for this technology with phones such as Samsung Moment ( see http://mobiletvbook.web.officelive.com/MobileTVonYouTube.aspx). The ATSC mobile DTV which is set to expand through 2010 is set to bring in a new era in mobile TV viewing in the United States. Its USP will be local stations, and mostly free to air broadcast reception.
Visitors to the exhibition will indeed be interested in understanding how this broadcaster driven technology will work in an environment where mobile operators hold the key to what handsets the users can use and which features it can support. Most mobile DTV markets in Europe have seen this facet of Mobile TV, where DVB-H operators ( such as in Germany) handed back the licenses when the mobile operators could not be persuaded to lend their support to a technology which took revenues off their networks and instead chose to go with 3G services supplemented with DVB-T transmissions, normally meant for large screen devices, but for which tuners could still be incorporated in handsets, based on the fact the viewing times are still quite low or that many of the mobile receivers are used in cars as combos of GPS and Terrestrial TV. If this was enough for the woes of technologies such as DVB-H, there has been also a quest to use analog TV tuners. Perhaps taking a cue from this, Telegent systems is demonstrating new chipsets and handsets with analog TV reception ( overcoming many of the initial problems) and also DVB-T( the European and south Asian standard for Digital TV). The new devices support reception of DVB-T/SECAM/PAL/NTSC and are this targeted at all markets. It does not really affect markets in the US where sun has set on NTSC. Visitors to the NAB will be keen to see how the OMVC proposes to handle these issues in the US markets. One solution is of course standalone receiver devices or USB tuners for laptops or notebooks, but the large markets still lie in mobile devices which number over 200 million.
The DTV marketplace is being supported by a host of companies such as Axcera ( for transmission products which help implement the ATSC Mobile DTV technology), Expway for ESG products and a host of others.
While mobile DTV is set to storm the centre stage after the DTV transition, interest is also growing in alternative technologies such as WiMAX, where CLEAR has steadily been growing in more and more markets in the United States and the latest projections of tripling the number of customers in 2010 have astounded the industry observers. This is bound to create of web of WiFi and WiMAX enabled centres, making it possible to access mobile internet content via means other than 3G networks. The support of Comcast and Time Warner lends it great credibility for carrying video and distribution of TV.
Visitors to the NAB are looking an answer to a host of questions which have been faced in Mobile DTV. How do customers such as those of iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android or other devices be brought in the domain of mobile DTV without the change of handsets? Does the answer lie in special devices with external tuners or in universal tuners in all handsets?
The primary issue in case of Mobile TV, and in particular where subscription based TV is concerned has been the availability of handsets widely enough for mobile TV to be practical. Even though there are over 500 million smartphones out in the market today, virtually none of them carry tuners for receiving any transmission of mobile TV. This is partly due to the fact that there have been multiple standards and virtually only one standard for Mobile TV i.e. MediaFLO. The result was that AT&T and Verizon wireless which fronted the development of Mobile TV based on FLO in USA, did it with just a couple of handsets ( such as LG Vu). But this was the case only till 2009. Late in 2009, the standards of ATSC Mobile DTV have been adopted, which are likely to change the scene completely.
In complete contrast is the case for Mobile TV in Japan and Korea, where it is free to air. In Japan, virtually all handsets now come with an ISDB tuner ( the Japanese standard for TV) built in for mobile TV reception. The result? More than 80 million devices have been shipped with mobile TV tuners. In Korea, nearly 20 million handsets have been shipped with DMB-T tuners, the standard for mobile TV in Korea.
USA is now ripe for mobile TV rollout on two counts. First, the ATSC Mobile DTV based networks will roll out strongly in 2010 through 2011, prompting more and more handsets to come out with built in tuners. Secondly, MediaFLO which now has a countrywide footprint with availability of spectrum is also widening its offerings including standalone receivers.
The situation can change quite dramatically before we close 2011 with mobile TV capable handsets being used much more frequently and casually than can be envisaged today.
The Conference super-sessions will also feature mobile technologies and content production extensively with April 13 Keynote ( Mobile TV: Ready for Prime Time? ) by Saul Berman and Gary Arlen , April 14: Multi-platform: Taking Content to the Next Level(Anthony Zuiker, Chris Wagner and Josh Walker) amongst others.
The Mobile Web, TV and Roaming Charges
Oct 2009
Questions are frequently asked as to whether there is really any need for special audio and video formats for mobile TV or infact any real justification for mobile specific websites? After all most mobile browsers such as Opera mini or Netfront can enable the viewing of any website? Can I not access Google, Yahoo or You Tube from my ordinary mobile phone browser? Or view a channel such as NBC? Similarly video players installed on mobile devices can enable viewing of any format of Video- Windows Media, Real, DivX or Flash. Then why create a new world of formats, browsers and players for mobile devices? Why have formats such as 3GPP video with low resolutions and frame rates? Or have low rate encoding using MPEG4 or have mobile enabled websites which support SVG-T or J2ME or Flash Lite? Is there not greater flexibility in being able to use the normal websites from airlines (for travel or holiday booking), weather, news or traffic information? Is it not better to listen to MP3 audio streams which is so popular and instead go for mobile audio services in AAC format?
The answer to this question is no and one of the causes lies primarily in the amounts of data you can consume when you use a mobile phone to stream video, browse a website or get navigation maps. If you are on a Wi-Fi network, the cost of data may be relatively low. But it can be very high on 3G mobile networks and more so if you happen to be roaming. This is well known to users of Blackberry or iPhone who happen to download web information or mails while travelling. Each mail can cost 20-50 cents while roaming, just a reminder of the expansive data you are using. The second reason lies in the capabilities of mobile devices in terms of processor power, memory and battery life. To put it straight rendering a full screen video on a mobile screen by doing format conversions and handling huge amounts of data which ordinary websites represent would reduce the battery life to under an hour.
An ordinary webpage has a size of 200 KB to 1.2 MB depending on how much text and pictures it carries. Most mobile browsers do not display images unless specifically requested, but even then a “normal webpage, not designed specifically for mobiles may have about 200 KB of data and involve 10-12 frames, many of which will be displayed on different screens breaking up a single webpage to 20 or more screens. On the other hand a mobile webpage is only 4kB or thereabouts of data.
While roaming such vast differences in webpage size can make all the difference. If while roaming, you need to search for some Hotel information, find its map or click through a few webpages to see its reviews, whether it has the facilities you need, and make reservations including payment, you might well use about 50 web pages before you are through. At 200 KB per page, this can mean 10MB of data. With an efficient browser which strictly avoids any popups or downloads any picture, the single use would have entailed the use of at least 5MB of data. Even after regional regulators such as the EU have sharply reduced the rates for data while roaming, the rates are prohibitively high. For example even within the EU the Orange and O2 charge £2.94 per MB, T-Mobile charges £1.50 per MB and Vodafone charges £5 for the first 15MB and £2 for every MB thereafter (prices based on a UK pay-monthly customer using data from France). If you are roaming between USA and EU, expect to pay no less than $3-4 per MB. This makes the simple transaction of a hotel booking using a conservative 5MB worth $50. The same transaction would cost only less than $5 if mobile enabled sites are used.
It is not that the carriers do not have data plans. With over 500 million smartphones in operation of all makes and types including Blackberry, iPhone,Nokia business phones and other devices, such a situation would have been unthinkable. However most data plans leave you with no less than $1 per MB. For example the AT&T offered data plans for travels to over 90 countries with rates as follows:
$24.99/month: 20 MB Data Global Add-On gives 20 MB of usage within over 90 countries
$59.99/month: 50 MB Data Global Add-On gives 50 MB of usage within over 90 countries
$119.99/month: 100 MB Data Global Add-On gives 100 MB of usage within over 90 countries
$199.99/month: 200 MB Data Global Add-On gives 200 MB of usage within over 90 countries
A similar situation prevailed for European carriers. The Vodafone World rates for roaming in USA, for example were £14.99($30) for 25 Mb of data( Plus charges for a message if sent via MMS).
Looks nice doesn’t it? 20 Mb is fine for applications using Blackberry mail?
However the main differences start to arise in other data intensive applications such as the YouTube, Google Video, watching Sports and Cartoons or looking at travel and weather channels. The mobile Video standards have been designed so that video (e.g. in 3GPP) can be streamed at as low data rates as 64 Kbps against a normal TV feed running at 1 Mbps. A mobile TV screen has only 80 K Pixels as against 300 K Pixels in a SDTV. With efficient coding protocols, the mobile TV runs at 1/20th data rates than what a streaming Standard definition TV takes. A 3 Minute Mobile Video at 64 Kbps is just 1MB. So for a user, even with mobile devices which have real or Windows media players, it makes a lot of sense to view video from mobile TV websites. Even so, such services can only be watched using only unlimited data plans which are hard to come by while roaming. This makes fallback to Wi-Fi a must and even here, mobile TV sites are a great help as full screen data rates cannot be sustained otherwise. There are horror stories of unsuspecting users ending up with $2000 bills just because they ventured out with their iPhones and used the device as they do at home without having subscribed to a data plan.
Within the US, FCC had already mandated roaming within the wireless ISP providers i.e.for services like Wi-Fi. It had also turned the heat on cellular wireless operators to mandate roaming agreements with smaller operators as just four operators i.e. AT&T, Sprint,T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless have 90% of subscribers on their networks. But the data roaming and the charges for it can make Shylock turn green with envy. Even as rates with the countries continue to fall, user continue to rise to 5 Billion and above and the use of smartphones and roaming is becoming commonplace the artificially high roaming data charges are creating a smaller world. In August 2009, the FCC voted in favour of an investigation on the state of affairs in the wireless phone market. However it would be wrong to think that the situation is any better in any other country. In India where the voice rates are 1 cent per minute within the country, these rise to $5 per minute while in the US( 500 times), even for in country calling. A global village? Hardly.
The problems are serious as everyone knows. But there is no global forum where such rates could be controlled so that the smartphones can remain smart even if you go out of the country. It hardly needs to be said that the use of search websites such as Google, Yahoo, MSN or BING; or the use of mail services such as Live, Gmail, yahoo Mail can be dispensed with just because you are travelling. Nor can most people give up social networking websites such as Facebook, Flickr!, Twitter or itsmy.com depending on the preference. Most people still like to watch stock updates, headline news or weather information and use internet radios or use navigation services. Despite the high roaming charges being under great pressure, these ordinary activities come within the realm of possibility with the use of websites designed specifically for mobiles like the Twitter, with message length limit of 140 characters.
Every major news, travel, mail or search website has its mobile version ( such as m.nbc.com) and it is just a matter of time before virtually every website gets web enabled. Mobile Video, both uploads and downloads will continue to rise as will streamed mobile TV from mobile specific websites such as MobiTV in the US. The roaming charges still remain a question mark. Perhaps the carriers which retain such charges are killing the golden goose as they underestimate the amount of traffic which can be built up if the roaming data charges come in the range of “matter of fact” usage. Else they might just lose all the traffic to Wi-Fi or similar technologies. The bell may be tolling for roaming data charges.
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CTIA 2009
Is it the Spectrum or the Technology which is giving in? A Window for Eco-friendly Technologies?
The CTIA 2009 was all about spctrum this time.The industry collectively demanded over 900 MHz of spectrum and by every account it is now believed that the spectrm is giving in. This is despite unprecedented allocations in the recent past of BRS,AWS and the WCS spectrum amongst others.
It is interesting to read that we are facing a spectrum shortage and that one of the reasons for it is just the 8 million iPhones and some more smartphones in the market, which have started to soak up the bandwidth and the spectrum. This makes it simplistic to understand and it is easy to believe that we are running out of spectrum. That may be easy to believe, but unfortunately, complicated to understand that we may also be running out of innovative technologies which may do better with spectrum.
The battle cry of spectrum running out was raised in the 1990’s when the analog cellular systems running at 30 KHz each had soaked up all the spectrum with not only a million users. Once the GSM and CDMA technologies came in, nothing much was heard on spectrum till recently, when the data services, once so sought after by the carriers actually took hold. So are we once again at the footsteps of another technology to deliver us from the spectrum woes?
Yes, we are, and even though we may not be able to rot our brains enough to come up with what it is, it is not far. The real problem is that the large operators always grow organically and have the least inclination to delve into innovative technologies, and with the exponential growth that we have seen so far, the spectrum shortage is natural.
A similar situation was foreseen in the early days of internet when internet streaming was being done without the benefit of Content delivery Networks (or Content mirrors at network edge). It was sincerely believed that even a million users will lead to the collapse of the internet if they started streaming from the same source. Of course nothing of the sort happened as the CDN technologies came in naturally.
The P2P networks and technologies like Bit Torrent create similarly efficient network infrastructures, though it is another matter that we have yet not developed sufficient expertise to allow them to operate securely. But it is now known that content need not be carried around recklessly if an appropriate architecture for the same is available. This requires intelligent network infrastructures, beyond what we have today. But with largely monopolistic control of the markets, few are willing to gamble on such infrastructures.
Wi-Fi is another technology, which rose very quickly into prominence. This is an eco-friendly technology in the sense that the size of the Wi-Fi “spots” are relatively small and the same footprint of frequency of about 100 MHz is used across the nation. With a proper backhaul, such as with Fibres or with WiMAX, it is possible to enable data services on a much larger scale than is possible today. The FCC has been well aware of it and has in place a roaming arrangement for the wireless ISPs.
But the issue is that the mobile operators see the Wi-Fi networks as “external” and go to great lengths so that the customers continue to use the mobile networks for data. Even the UMA ( or generic network access) which allows interoperability between the Wi-Fi and the 3G networks routes the data through 3G switches. The 3G switches themselves remain with legacy circuit switched architectures, with embedded gateways and signalling converters. An IP core is the objective but is not here yet. The 3G provides for multicast structures i.e. MBMS where a number of video streams can be multicast to thousands of users instead of thousands of streams being sent out from massive servers, each using up spectral resource. But there are virtually no implementations of MBMS so far.
The next generation network (NGN) initiative of the ITU has is based on an IP core, but with the ITU parentage being of fixed line operators, it is still oriented towards these networks. There are few which have thought of the mobile wireless networks with an integrated IP core using IPv6 which can use the spectrum optimally with techniques such as Continuous packet Connectivity and P2P type of network architectures.
Today we are lacking on both the fronts: the radio networks themselves, which are relatively inefficient and the network architectures right up to application level which have outlived their lives.
We are not trying to say that “this is it” i.e. the mobile P2P is the answer or it is the femtocells which will enable extensive reuse. But we certainly have exhausted the technology which is driving the present networks. It is creating a Frankenstein’s Monster of the spectrum requirements and if the same technologies continue to be used, any amount of spectrum will bring up against a wall.
In fact, this state of affairs has arisen when the real use of video streaming is still very limited due to the restrictions placed by the carriers, and the use of data while roaming overseas or even within the country is miniscule. The primary reason for this is that we are just at the beginning of the uptrend of the use of video, gaming, navigation and multimedia services. The growth trend should take us on a growth profile of well over a hundred times of the media that we use today, if it is not restricted by inefficient architectures. To be fair new architectures have been proposed by the 3GPP in the form of LTE, with speeds of 100 Mbps. But perhaps speed is not all that will be required. The granularity of the data use will be of primary importance, where a device, wireless enabled, will perhaps send a few bytes a day without making a call or a connection. WiMAX architectures are good for low data granularity but we will need to see far these networks are able to go against a foreboding competitor.
There are numerous other examples of such technologies which took the capacities much beyond the projected growth within the same physical infrastructures such as the multimode optical fibers ( Transmission capacity is today never a limitation even on the heaviest routes). The spot beam Ka satellites is another example, but we will stop here as such examples are far too many. All that we can say is that new technology is the solution to the types of impasses which we now see in “spectrum shortage”.
While we cannot predict the technology, we can begin to predict the trends which will perhaps constitute the elements of a future wireless network which will deliver much more in the resources we have today. For example, such a network will need to extensively depend on broadcast based deliveries where large base of users can be served for common content instead of millions of individual data streams. These may be in the form of FLO, ATSC M/H, MBMS or other technologies. Which one exactly is not important, but the elements will lie in mobile broadcasting. Secondly it will need to be able to deal with data streams of different types more intelligently. For VoIP the data packets are small but the periodicity required is high and latency small. For dormant wireless devices ( such as washing machines) the latency is of no value but the granularity required may be just a byte. The new architectures will need to more intelligently manage content as content now forms the bulk of what is transmitted on the networks. It may not be precisely p2p but close. We will also need network architectures which enable wireless devices to talk peer-to –peer because the use of such frequencies is ecologically more efficient. They do not impact a whole building or a city.
The FCC will need to play a key role in such initiatives. The industry bodies such as CTIA are important but they represent the collective wishes of the larger players. It is the FCC, which mooted net neutrality, (which has not been to the liking of the established players, and yet to take off), but is the one which can give some innovative players to come up with something disruptive.
So are we going to see a Malthusian disaster of ever growing demand and exhausting supplies? In a holistic model yes. But the heydays of such models never come as history is witness