Koreans tout standard for US mobile TV
LG and Samsung have just what you need
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LG and Samsung have teamed up to have their respective technologies accepted as the American standard for mobile TV, just as Dish starts casting around for someone to help them build such a network.
America already has a couple of broadcast mobile TV networks based around Qualcomm's MediaFLO technology. But last year the Open Mobile Video Coalition was set up to define a standard for mobile broadcasting, on the basis that there aren't nearly enough standards already.
The coalition is made up of broadcasters - no-one else is allowed to join - and includes Fox, ION and NBC amongst others representing more than 850 TV stations around the USA. They've been looking at various technologies to make up their new standard, and today announced the conclusion of trials using technologies from LG and Samsung with the recommendation that they be adopted.
The technologies involved are LG's "Mobile-Pedestrian-Handheld" and Samsung's "Advanced VSB". This combination was shown to provide decent reception on the move, and up to 40 miles from the transmitter, though that will depend on the frequency.
"Agreement on a standard takes our industry to the next level in the development and rollout of products and services, and the OMVC remains fully committed to the ATSC's current planned schedule of adopting a final standard by July of 2009," said Anne Schelle, executive director of the OMVC, in a statement.
That might not be soon enough for companies such as Dish, which has just spent $712m on a chunk of 700MHz spectrum that will be available from February next year. It wants to get mobile TV up and running quickly, though it revealed in its quarterly results call that it's looking for a partner to share the cost of building the network. Dish has been testing various standards, including DVB-SH, but has yet to settle on a technology.
Not that the OMVC is planning to wait long: "Next we'll be focused on consumer trials with the goal of realizing mobile DTV for consumers as soon as possible," continues Anne Schelle. This is good to hear, as right now the industry seems to be prepared to invest massively in a service with still very unproven demand. ®
COMMENTS
A-VSB will be good for all DTV users
If A-VSB is approved, it will be a good thing for all DTV viewers.
The current VSB standard is somewhat more susceptible to interference and distortion of the encoded signal. Multipath, AM interference and doppler shifts in the carrier frequency all affect VSB to a greater extent than DVB-T. This is the trade off for having a more power efficient transmission scheme.
Supposedly, A-VSB will do several things. First off, it will offer improved error resilience in the VSB modulated packets in the form of a new reference signal. This will help DTV receivers when faced with a signal degraded by multipath or doppler shifting. Second, A-VSB will offer new encoding modes that support greater amounts of error correction (at the cost of lower data bitrates). However, since many people have suggested that A-VSB would be rolled out with MPEG4-AVC/H.264 video encoding, such bandwidth losses would be partially offset.
Besides, who needs 1920x1080 video on a 6" screen?
A shiny new future
requires yet another standard: multicast over WiMAX
Which isn't a new standard really, but rather what the next generation of "open networks" should use, existing and "open" standards.
I'll buy that for a dollar!
maybe
Unless of course there is a xxx-subscription channel available.
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