Television and mobile telecommunications are two sectors that have steadily converged over the past five years and many believe mobile TV is now poised to become a mainstream reality.

New standards and technologies, guided by leading mobile operators, broadcasters, mobile phone makers, software and content providers, have combined to set the stage for terrestrial digital television services optimized to mobile usage.

However, the market is not without its problems. Firstly, it is highly fragmented and it is unlikely that we will see only one global mobile TV standard. Instead, DVB-H will be the most popular standard with widespread adoption in Europe, South America, Africa, and the Middle East. Other broadcast standards will have a more regional footprint: MediaFLO and ATSC-MH will be used in the US; T-DMB and S-DMB in South Korea; ISDB-T in Japan and Brazil; and China may adopt one or two home-grown standards such as CMMB and TMMB.

These regional standards may reach a few deployments outside of their home markets, but their success will be limited.

Finally, non-broadcast technologies streamed over the 3G networks are also gaining prominence. This is already happening in lots of markets and streaming forms the bulk of mobile TV today. This is greatly aided by the upgrade to 3.5G and the fact that they can be deployed without a new network, utilizing existing assets. This, combined with new streaming technologies and handsets that improve performance and crucially extend battery life, mean that streaming is seeing a resurgence in popularity.

Part of the problem is that it still remains unclear which technology will dominate. The European Commission has backed DVB-H as the mobile TV standard in Europe and has contributed about EUR40 million (US$53.7 million) toward the research and development of the technology. But that does not mean that all other mobile TV technologies have been eradicated in the EU member states. The recent announcement by UK carriers Orange and T-Mobile that they intend to jointly pilot a new broadcast mobile TV technology that uses existing cellular spectrum shows the situation is still fluid.

Some mobile broadcasting technologies are heavily vendor backed. DVB-H is being seen as largely a Nokia-backed technology while obviously MediaFLO has Qualcomm's backing. Ericsson has so far remained relatively neutral but in July 2008 announced that DVB-H would make up a "very small part" of the mobile TV world. The method of distribution and the size of the handsets were cited as reasons that it will lose out to MBMS - a mobile multicast technology. Ericsson believes mobile TV will primarily be unicast [over HSPA or LTE networks], because that is the biggest vehicle; the only real time broadcast mobile TV will be for live sports events. In mid-February 2008, Ericsson and South Korean vendor LG Electronics went on to claim they had successfully demonstrated an MBMS-based mobile TV service in Sweden.

Global giants Vodafone and Hutchison, as well as South Korean operators, are reportedly interested in an MBMS-based mobile TV service, which LGE predicts will be fully commercialized in 2009. According to Ericsson, MBMS stands to gain economies of scale over Nokia-backed DVB-H, which is broadcast over terrestrial TV networks.

3G mobile TV and broadcast mobile TV are two very different propositions. Being able to download supplementary content around what the user is watching on mobile broadcast TV is an important evolution. The future of mobile TV will not be just broadcast or 3G, but will be a mix of technologies matched to a mix of audience experiences. Personalization is the growing trend, so any mobile TV strategy that does not prepare for that is only going to offer half the picture.

However, there is a general admission that mobile TV streaming without an MBMS upgrade would run into severe problems should the service go mass market. Networks - especially backhaul - would not be able to cope with the traffic. It is for this reason that mobile broadcast is expected to take off in the 2010/2011 timeframe when streaming ceases to be viable on a mass market scale.

This is an extract from the Mobile TV - 4th edition report.