Going Mobile: Wireless TV Market in the UK Takes Off

"Over the past eighteen months operators in the UK have seen the opportunity," says Alastair Brydon, CEO of Sound Partners and author of the Analysys Research report Making a Success of Mobile TV and Video. And where there is opportunity, the pressure to pilot new services and grab market share while the subscribers are still experimenting has risen rapidly. The opportunity is there but questions such as the technology to choose, the best content and the business models remain unanswered.

Competing technologies
According to some industry watchers, one of the biggest challenges—and the reason there are so many trials at the moment—is that there are just too many technology options, many of which are far from proven.

At this stage, the options fall into one of three categories. The oldest and most "proven" option is using the packet data channel with a unicast stream from a streaming server to a player application in the handset. This has the benefit of using bandwidth that operators have already built out with the 3G networks, but the bandwidth could run short if the services become popular. Another problem exists, even on lightly loaded networks. With mobile subscribers and error-prone radio networks lacking quality-of-service guarantees, the viewing experience is easily compromised. The other issue with the data service approach is that the operator cannot currently offer different subscriber levels. Packages are based on the type of content, not the quality of the reception.

The second category currently in use relies on the circuit switched cellular network for the radio access segment. In this scenario the subscriber places a video call to a 3G gateway using a shortcode provided by the operator, and the subscriber is in a point-to-point video call with a streaming media portal. From that point on, the technology is essentially identical to that in the above scenario. The improvement is that the connection between the IP network and the handset is a dedicated 64Kbps circuit and can be controlled by DTMF tones. Subscribers can use their keypads to control what they see, as well as to vote or place a bet. Operators can also rely on a very simple billing method: they bill based on the number of minutes in a call.

When mobile TV was introduced in South Korea, the same challenges existed. Services were introduced as data over the cellular network, but the charging structure was inappropriate to the data consumed and subscribers suffered from sticker shock (the phenomenon became known as "death by megabyte"). Since then, handset manufacturers have developed tiny TV tuners which are built into handsets.

With receivers in handsets, the next generation of broadcast technologies—the third category of technology to address the mobile TV challenge—is now emerging. South Korea’s technology, an enhancement of Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) technology called Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB), is mature and has the advantage of using spectrum which in the UK has already been allocated for digital radio broadcasting. This is the technology used by British Telecommunication (BT) in its trials. The competing European standard, Digital Video Broadcasting–Handheld (DVB-H) is backed by industry giant Nokia, among others; however, the industry regulator Office of Communications (Ofcom) has indicated that the spectrum may not be available for DVB-H before 2012, when analog TV spectrum will be switched off. (For a look at the DVB-H debate in the U.S., see article on Streaming Media.com.) Finally, in the U.S., Qualcomm is launching a service based on MediaFLO, its proprietary broadcast-to-handset technology.

Brydon points out that, while these broadcast technologies overcome the capacity limitations of the other solutions, they have a number of disadvantages for mobile operators, including (in some cases) a current lack of licensed spectrum, the massive cost of building a new network, and a potential loss of control of mobile TV services.