European solidarity crumbling on digital mobile TV

A technology for mobile digital television in Europe may have had a better chance for a full rollout before the EC mandated it as Europe's official standard. Now, a leading analyst reports that hope may be fading for DVB-H.

In March, the European Commission agreed that DVB-H would be the standard for terrestrial mobile television broadcasting, thanks to the directing hand of Commissioner Viviane Reding. Only five months later, German service provider T-Systems, an arm of Deutsche Telekom, rolled out a DVB-T service to its customers despite the EC mandate that providers stick to DVB-H.

DVB-T and DVB-H in Germany would end up like the standards in Asia S- and T-DMB, where one is subscription-based and the other is free and ad-supported, but both are offered by the same company.

Being a Luxembourger, Reding's strong stance on picking a single format and driving it into production was largely based on the EU's successful implementation of GSM. According to EuroStat, mobile phone penetration is higher in Luxembourg than in any other European nation by far, and many regulatory decisions have attempted to follow the pattern set by GSM.

In his paper "No Way to Regulate: Mobile TV in Europe," Parks Associates Director of Research John Barrett wrote, "Unfortunately, the market and technological conditions [bear] little resemblance to the GSM scenario regulators faced in the early eighties. For starters, spectrum availability differs from country to country. DVB-H is ideally suited for the UHF TV spectrum, but in some markets (the U.K., France, etc.), TV broadcasters are still using these frequencies and will not fully vacate them until around 2012.

"Secondly, the use of DVB-H denies operators the possibility of leveraging established network infrastructure," Barrett continued. "As a counterpoint to DVB-H, DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) technology is designed to piggyback on DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) radio networks, which are deployed extensively in Holland, the U.K., and Germany."

A report published by In-Stat in April predicted the international discrepancies in mobile TV broadcast would never be solved, despite maturation of the industry. By expediting the regulatory process, the EC may actually be forcing content providers to move more slowly, so providers like T-Systems have simply followed Comm. Reding's lead and "taken the matter into their own hands."

In a panel discussion at CES this year, Ambassador and US Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy David A. Gross was asked if the US' choice of "letting the market decide" the mobile DTV standard was going to be a revisiting of the GSM situation, in which Europe surged ahead of the US. The government's job, Gross responded, is to make spectrum available and encourage competition, not decide which formats the companies are to utilize.