In a move to strengthen the prospects of mobile video, nine major television broadcaster station groups have joined the Open Mobile Video Coalition ("OMVC"). The new members include Cox Television, LIN TV Corporation, Meredith Corporation, Media General, Post-Newsweek, and the non-profit Association of Public Television Stations (APTS) trade group. Already in the Coalition are groups such as Belo Corp., Fox Television, Gannett Broadcasting, NBC, Telemundo, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Broadcasting Company. The Coalition was formed earlier this year to accelerate the development of mobile digital broadcast television.

Aldo Cugnini
Analyst

"We are joining forces with a group of forward-thinking television leaders to explore the exciting new frontier of mobile digital television," said Alan Frank, President of the Post Newsweek Television stations and TV Board Chairman of the National Association of Broadcasters, in a statement last week. Brandon Burgess, CEO of ION Media Networks, added, "We are looking forward to working with the technology industry on delivering mobile digital television to consumers."

According to the statement, the group has received "significant interest" from hardware and transmission equipment manufacturers, and has established a timeline that calls for parallel development of standards, devices and business models with the goal of a 2009 launch. The Coalition reports that estimates of 2007 U.S. sales of portable and mobile video playback devices run as high as 100M units, including sales of video-capable mobile phones, personal media players, portable game players, imaging devices, notebook PCs, and in-car entertainment devices. The group is anticipating that the addition of a low-cost receiver module will allow these devices to receive DTV broadcasts from any of the 1,600 digital television stations in the U.S. that choose to transmit mobile capable signals.

Earlier this year, the ATSC separately initiated a call for proposals for a mobile and handheld standard, dubbed ATSC-M/H. Among the respondents are LG/Harris and Samsung/Rohde & Schwarz, with their competing MPH and A-VSB systems, respectively. The Coalition hasn’t formally backed these or any other mobile DTV technology, but it has participated in tests of these systems, including test markets in Tampa, Fla. and Washington, D.C. Expect the work of the OMVC to dovetail with the ATSC work, and to attempt to affect its outcome.

Last year, a different group - The Mobile DTV Alliance - was founded by a consortium of companies, to promote the adoption of DVB-H for mobile TV in North America. The companies include Intel, Microsoft, Modeo, Motorola, Nokia and Texas Instruments. As reported here last week, Crown Castle appears to have lost interest in the venture, having executed a long-term lease of its DVB-H spectrum to a team of equity investors, Telcom Ventures and Columbia Capital. Industry speculation points out that the investor groups are heavily invested in XM Satellite Radio. With XM looking to expand its services, the lease could be a means for it to do so. Columbia and Crown Castle have declined comment, and XM has been silent as well.

In Europe, Virgin Mobile has just announced that it will halt its mobile television service early next year, following a European Union decision to back the rival DVB-H standard. Virgin launched its mobile television service in October 2006, but opted to back British Telecom’s DAB-IP-based service, BT Movio. BT announced Thursday that it will dump the BT Movio service, which had Virgin as its only customer.

In the U.S., Verizon and AT&T have already chosen Qualcomm’s MediaFLO for mobile TV. With three different systems in contention - ATSC, DVB-H, and MediaFLO - it would seem that the latter currently has the most traction, with Verizon having launched the "Mobile VCAST" service commercially back in March. From a spectrum standpoint, however, ATSC could have an advantage, in that the entire UHF DTV spectrum - some 221Mhz - could be used, compared to the 6MHz of MediaFLO (at former UHF channel 55), and Crown Castle’s 5-MHz of weather-balloon spectrum at 1.67 GHz. Of course, the ATSC DTV spectrum must be "shared" with TV services, but on the assumption that a mobile service would take up about 5% of an ATSC channel’s bandwidth, there’s still a slight advantage in "air space," and that could mean more diversified services. Offsetting that would be channel penetration in a market, and the "uncoordinated" multi-broadcaster footprint. The real difference may come down to the robustness and attractiveness of the particular services. "Content is king," but only if you can access it.

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