NAB 2011

Mobile DTV Will Be Everywhere At NAB Show

Panels, papers, prototypes and ready-to-go technology exhibits on the emerging broadcast mobile market will be a big part of next week's NAB Show in Las Vegas. Says ATSC's Jerry Whitaker, "This is the year that broadcast stations want to put mobile on the air and are indeed acting on that.”
By
TVNewsCheck,

Broadcasters led by NBC and Fox have promised to launch commercial mobile DTV service in the U.S. by the end of this year. And that ambition is reflected in the agenda and exhibition of the NAB Show, which open a week-long run in Las Vegas on April 9.

Experts will weigh in on a range of mobile DTV issues — from how to implement it to how to enhance it to how to make money from it.

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At the heart of the mobile DTV agenda is a Super Session — “Mobile TV: A Path to the Future” — slated for Monday, April 11, at 2:30 p.m. in Room S222.

“We will look at several areas of mobile TV,” said Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, who will moderate. “We’ll look for a revenue model — a business model for it. Whether it uses advertising or is paid for by consumers. We will look at how broadcasting competes with other wireless Internet services including apps for broadcasters.”

Arlen said stations that already offer branded mobile iPad and iPhone apps for their viewers could be competing with themselves when transmitting mobile DTV. The panel, he said, will examine that issue.

“We will also have people on the panel from the Mobile Content Venture [Erik Moreno, SVP, corporate development, Fox] as well as the Mobile500 Alliance [Randa Minkarah, SVP, revenue and business development, Fisher Communications].

“These are the two groups who are developing content for mobile television. I want to see how they will work together, how they will compete and, more importantly, how outsiders envision their services. We’ll also discuss what it will take for mobile TV to become a ’mainstream’ service, and we’ll try to identify some realistic timetables for this process.”

In addition to Moreno and Minkarah, the panel will feature Saul Berman, global strategy and change services leader at IBM Global Business Services; John Elliott, partner, Accenture Mobility; John Fletcher, analyst, SNL Kagan; and Loren Lasley, VP worldwide sales, Siano Mobile Silicon.

Organizers of the NAB Engineering Conference have put together an entire afternoon (Sunday, April 10, in Room S219 starting at 1 p.m.) to address various aspects of mobile DTV.

Planned presentations include a review of the three-year effort to develop the service; an update on the field testing; a look at gap fillers, repeaters and translators; an examination of studio-to-transmitter links; a discussion of distributed antenna repeater systems; and a look at non-obvious considerations for adding mobile DTV to a broadcast station.

“The headline is the mobile DTV system is rapidly moving from a period of standardization to one of implementation,” said Jerry Whitaker, VP of standards development at the Advanced Television Systems Committee, who will open the session with a status report on the technology.

“The services are now being built out, business plans are being developed and it’s becoming a marketplace entity as opposed to being in trials and tests. The rollout begins in earnest this year. This is the year that broadcast stations want to put mobile on the air and are indeed acting on that.”

Whitaker said there's a high level of interest in mobile DTV. “Mobile DTV has many facets to it,” he said. “There’s the technology of getting it on the air. There are the business issues of how to monetize it. There are service trade-offs like how do you divide up the through-put of content. There’s new codec technology, and — on the audio side — how to manage the dynamic range for mobile devices versus in the living room at home.”

Added just this week is a session called “Emergency Alerts in Mobile TV,” which will feature a group of Japanese broadcasters describing their experiences with mobile television during the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami. It will be held Tuesday, April 12, at 10:30 a.m. in room N249. Among other things, the session will address incorporating the Japanese emergency alert system into U.S. mobile DTV.

As part of the “Improving Mobile TV Reception” session, to be held on Thursday, April 14, at 10 a.m. in room S226, William Meintel, a partner in Meintel, Sgrignoli & Wallace, will discuss field testing of the mobile DTV standard by his firm, which indicates “there is a serious need for a new service prediction model.”

Meintel’s paper will proffer a new service prediction model based on field data integrated with propagation theory, receiver specifications, terrain data, land use data and available local environmental data.

In the North Hall of the convention center (N4036), the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) and the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), together with NAB, will sponsor the Mobile DTV Pavilion, a showcase of the evolving mobile DTV receiver technology.

Ten companies are participating: LG Electronics, Hauppauge Computer Works, DTVinteractive, Pixtree, Mobile Content Venture, Triveni, The Mobile500 Alliance, Crest Technology, Decontis and Axel Technology.

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Comments (9) -

Johnny Fever posted a year ago
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Will mobile TV be a separate portable HDTV receiver that receives the VHF/UHF TV signal and decodes it for a portable device (Free OTA TV per sec) rather than a pay per minute scam from the cellphone robberbarrons? There are already 'portable' 7" HDTV, but you can't move them an inch; can I assume this will be a offshoot of that in a more robust mode?
Rocker Nickname posted a year ago
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No, completely different.. See omvc.org (Open Mobile Video Coalition)
PSIPthing Nickname posted a year ago
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ATSC M/H isn't HDTV. There are only a few receivers, but we can expect to seem some mobile telephones (any day now) that support it. There will most likely be a mixture of free services and paid services. To receive M/H, a device must have a tuner that handles it; the cell companies aren't involved in transmitting the content. ATSC M/H might be built into, at some point in the future, home television sets. The system has been tested to be almost perfect when being used in a vehicle travelling in excess of the legal highway speed limit. (Just don't watch from the driver's seat.)
PhillyPhlash Nickname posted a year ago
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If broadcasters use their existing channels as "bait" for enhanced services -- and keep existing OTA channels FREE OF CHARGE on mobile devices, open to all -- then mobile TV will usher in a second renaissance of broadcast television. If, on the other hand, the greedsters win out, and make mobile TV strictly a pay service with no free TV component, lawmakers will rise up and threaten to take away publicly owned spectrum -- which is exactly what the Genachowski FCC wants. So broadcasters, avoid problems -- make your existing services free and clear to all mobile TV devices, with no cost of entry whatsoever other than the cost of the receiver, and make your money on add-on, enhanced services, such as movie and all-news channels. Bottom line: Broadcast TV stations will commit suicide if they don't make existing service free to all via mobile TV.
PSIPthing Nickname posted a year ago
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yeah, how are those 7" portable "HDTV" sets selling these days. The only people who are talking about a totally pay mobile tv service will use non-broadcast spectrum, or are mobile operators. All existing "services" in broadcasting are free. You seem to say that broadcasters should ONLY be permitted to use the 1960 model of television broadcasting. I think most rational people can see that ship has been taking on water for some time.
PhillyPhlash Nickname posted a year ago
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No, that's not what I said at all. All I am saying is give the razor handles (existing broadcast stations) away for free and charge for the blades (pay services, custom content, etc.). If broadcasters ensure that "free TV" migrates to mobile TV with no cost of entry, they will reap a bounty by charging for premium channels, maybe even an existing all-news channel such as CNN. If broadcasters construct any kind of toll road to existing channels on mobile, they will shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to the spectrum wars. I think most "rational" people can see you are a paid psyops agent -- for whom, I'm not sure, but I think I know...
PSIPthing Nickname posted a year ago
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I misunderstood. Whether a toll road is established isn't really in the hands of the broadcaster, but in the hands of the content provider. Each network seems to have a different attitude. Stations with serious news presences will have access to all the news content they need, but this is a "long tail." I think you might want to do some internet sleuthing on my name (it's the one I was born with.) Nobody pays me but my customers and clients, and they are exclusively broadcasters and cable operators, and nobody has "paid" me so far this year. Not that I have anything to complain about: late last year was just fine, giving me much "coasting" time. The problems come up when you "think" you know something.
PhillyPhlash Nickname posted a year ago
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Okay, so it's vigilante psyops. What's the diff?
PSIPthing Nickname posted a year ago
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none, I guess: you're still off your meds. And, you have now defamed me twice in two days. Being called a vigilante isn't borne by the facts (I'm not taking the law into my own hands) nor am I paid, and you still behave just like a lunatic.

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