Mobile TV Will Air World Cup Games

Broadcast mobile TV service, using technology developed in Korea instead of a European-backed system, will kick off next week in Germany days ahead of the World Cup soccer tournament.

Mobiles Fernsehen Deutschland GmbH (MFD) has secured spectrum from local media authorities to broadcast TV signals to mobile phones, using technology based on the DMB (Digital Media Broadcasting) standard. MFD will collaborate with mobile phone service provider Debitel AG to offer commercial service from May 31 in a number of cities, including eight of the twelve hosting the World Cup games, the companies said earlier this week.

Over the past several months, MFD has quietly struck license deals with several German broadcasting companies, including public broadcaster ZDF, which has the rights to air half of the 96 tournament games. MFD has also deployed infrastructure in the World Cup cities Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Gelsenkirchen, Hamburg, Hanover, Munich and Stuttgart.

Mobile phone manufacturers have been gunning to use the World Cup games — one of the world’s biggest media events — to promote mobile TV. But two rival standards, DMB and DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld), have split the industry.

The DMB standard, which evolved from the DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) standard, is being pushed by South Korean manufacturers. LG Electronics was the first company to offer a mobile TV phone based on the DMB format. At the Cebit trade show in Germany last year, a mobile TV demonstration featured a DMB-based phone from Samsung Electronics.

But DMB is being challenged by DVB-H, which was approved by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute in late 2004. The standard is backed by numerous European media authorities and some of the world’s largest handset makers, including Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Siemens and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications.

While the DVB-H camps claim more channels and greater efficiency, the frequency spectrums for the technology aren’t currently available on a nationwide basis in many European countries including Germany. That’s a problem because it could take a few years for these to open up.

By contrast, DMB uses different spectrum that is available, and that’s essentially why MFD chose it — to get a jump on the competition.

The company plans to launch two handsets, one each from LG and Samsung, when the service goes live, according to Henrik Rinnert, a cofounder of the mobile TV venture.

Earlier this year, a senior executive from German telco Deutsche Telekom AG said the mobile phone industry would “miss a shot” at selling new broadcast mobile TV services at the World Cup games in Germany.

Lothar Pauly, a board member of Deutsche Telekom and chief executive officer of the group’s IT services subsidiary, T-Systems International GmbH, said “the time axis isn’t right.”

Pauly may be right about the commercial availability of DVB-H service but MFD could prove him dead wrong about DMB.

Stay tuned.

-John Blau, IDG News Service

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