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SITTING ON THE TRAIN on the way to work, your smart new 3G phone rings to tell you that England have just

.- 5 In case you weren't watching enough I - 6 television alreadx now broadcast TV is m

taken the lead in the match in Australia which kicked off while YOU were at home

- 2 Coming to your mobile phone. BY Dominic Lenton

enjoying breakfast. Seconds later you're

downloading a brief video clip. Combined with all the other features that 3G has to

offer, this could he enough to persuade you to pay up for a handset and contract. But wouldn't you rather be able to watch the whole match live while you're on the move, switching from the TV in the kitchen to the screen on your mobile phone as you walk out of the house?

With 3G take-up going far slower than operators hoped and the pioneering 3 service in the UK struggling to achieve initial sales targets, stakeholders from network operators to content providers are looking at more reliable ways of generating money in a

saturated handset market. Adding broadcast television functionality to mobile devices, whether they're phones or personal digital assistants, could be the answer.

HYBRID NETWORKS Compared with evolving technologies like 3G, for which streaming video is some way off, "broadcasting has good guaranteed revenue streams," says Peter MacAvock, executive director of digital broadcast standards body DVB. The organisation +

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40 using DVB-T digital terrestrial television broadcasts.

Europe may not be far behind. Last month, Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM), Europe’s second largest mobile operator, said that customers equipped with the most up-to-date handsets would be able to watch programmes from four broadcasters in real time using video streaming technology from RealNetworks. The service, which TIM claims is the first of its kind in the world,

“in JUST A QUESTION OF USOWG UHE RIGHT M E D I U M UN THE RlCHT WAY FOR THE RIGHT DEVICE:’ - SIMON MASON, HEAD OF NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT NTL BROADCAST

has already established an ad hoc working group in collaboration with third generation telecoms trade body ~ the UMTS Forum ~ which is looking at the feasibility of hybrid networks incorporating both broadcast and mobile communications branches.

Work to date has highlighted the enormous difference in spectrum efficiency when using the two different approaches for ‘one to many’ delivery of multimedia content. Getting a 100 second video clip to a million mobile subscribers at lOOkbps and a latency of 1000 seconds could occupy an entire 3G network for up to 15 minutes, while the same content could be delivered by the broadcast route using only around 0 .1% of capacity

Device manufacturers are particularly keen to help kick-start anything that might help sales. According to Goran Wahlberg, Nokia’s director of concepts and technology, the company sees the future of mobile services in what it describes as ’location-independent

wiU be free of charge until January 2004. In the UK, industry organisation the

Digital Television Group (DTG) has just established a new Mobile TV Applications Group whose members include NTL, Crown Castle and BBC Research & Development, as well as Pioneer and Nokia. The group aims to promote industry and government interest in applications, as well as organising demonstrator projects.

SHOTGUN WEDDING With technical solutions relying on a

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shotgun wedding of broadcast and communications technologies, standards have a big part to play By the end of the year, DVB expects to finalise a new standard - DVB-H - which will address

issues like power saving. The standard will make it possible to deliver data at

consumption’, made possible by the joint utilisation 10Mbit/s without the power dissipation of telecoms and broadcast technologies. “Digital associated with using the DVB-T digital terrestrial television enables terrestrial television standard for a large number of new mobile applications. (The very high service opportunities,” he bandwidth rates defined by the DVB-T said. Kitted out with a TV standard force receivers to capture receiver card, “every laptop the full l2Mbps signal, making power could be a mobile TV”. consumption a crucial issue.)

From the telecoms sector, there are ASIA-PACIFIC LEADS THE WAY several attempts to incorporate Leading the way in integrated broadcast capability within the 3G mobile telecoms and broadcast devices are the Asia infrastructure. The Third Pacific countries where long commutes are a way of Generation Partnership Project, life and there is massive enthusiasm for mobile which brings together a number of devices. Samsung says it is ‘aggressively going after telecoms standards bodies, has the Korean market’ with a range of multimedia considered extending the broadcast mobiles that includes the SCH-X820 TV phone. capabilities of the 3G standard to Japanese satellite broadcaster MBSat is launching a include Multimedia Broadcast new satellite for direct broadcast of CD-quality audio Multicast Services. The crunch and MPEG-4 video to mobile devices, with services issue, is justifying the use of scheduled to begin in early 2004, while China has four expensive frequency resources for cities online delivering TV to passengers on buses, an uncertain business model.

Complex routing and quality of service issues are other potential stumbling blocks.

THE POWER ISSUE Regardless of the standards activity, there are some crucial technological challenges that handset manufacturers will need to address. “The issue is power saving,” says MacAvock. The standard model of Samsung’s TV Phone has a battery life of under two hours ~ fine if you want to watch the match, but not if you want to chat about it with your friends afterwards.

Reception power can be reduced by using time division multiplexing to activate the receiver only in bursts. But processing the large amounts of video data involved requires power-hungry processors, hardware accelerators and memory,

One answer is offered by UK company Alphamosaic, a spin-off from Cambridge Consultants, which has created a single-chip solution for mobile video processing. Based on a new processor architecture that is specifically optimised for efficient processing of two- dimensional video data, the VCOl has all the memory and peripherals required for low-power encoding, decoding, analysis and processing.

THEDABAPPROACH MacAvock admits that impatient broadcasters who sniff customer demand will inevitably use existing platforms to deliver services rather than waiting for DVB-H. This raises the prospect of a digital audio standard like DAB being used to deliver television to a mobile phone. (The narrow bandwidth of the DRM digital radio standard means it is totally unsuited to video delivery, while digital terrestrial video’s need to decode an entire data stream makes it extremely power hungry)

UK-based digital radio software specialist Radioscape attracted a lot of attention in April when it demonstrated how its software-based DAB receiver card could be used to stream video to a PDA at 64kbps. Its latest advance, unveiled at the IBC broadcast industry event in Amsterdam in September, is real- time streaming of data rather than the packetised solution on show earlier in the year.

“DAB is a great way of delivering video cheaply,”

“BROADCASTING HAS GOOD GUARANTEED REWEN UE

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, DVB PROJECT OFFICE

STREAMS:’ - PETER MACAVOCK,

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says Radioscape sales director Martin Kingdon. “A number of people are thinking about it.” Ideal for one to many applications that 3G finds it difficult to handle, DAB TV could be received even on a high-speed train travelling at 300km/h.

The UK is way ahead of other countries in audio DAB services and will have virtually national coverage by the end of 2003. Kingdon believes consumer demand for video on the move will mirror that seen in Asia and boost its use for TV “This kind of video delivery is going to be targeted at PDAs and smartphones,” he said. “PCs are going to be an important market as well.”

Despite all this activity, Kingdon says, there will still be a market for the multimedia functionality offered by 3G, primarily in one-to-one applications like personal picture and video messaging.

EXCITING PROSPECrS These days mobile devices are not single- purpose. They need to he able to interact with other gadgets. At IBC, NTL Broadcast got together with partners ~ including Radioscape - to demonstrate an integrated system delivering multimedia services to a central home gateway and then on to the car and mobile devices. On the move, users can update content via DAB broadcasts to their phone. “We think you can build a business on this,” said Simon Mason. the company’s head of new product development. “The data channels are there to be used and it‘s just a question of using the right medium in the right way for the right device. Increasingly, people are going to want to access content in a convenient form whenever it suits them; this approach allows them to do just that.”

Nokia’s Goran Wahlberg of Nokia agrees that the ability to receive broadcasts on a mobile device that is also capable of using the communications infrastructure as a return path is an exciting prospect. “Interactive services that have been at a low level so far will be greatly improved,” he says. “There are a huge number of possibilities. Some will become hits, although others will never get off the drawing board.”