Monday, 23 June 2008

Hosted DVB-H Mobile TV Service Launched in Asia

Alcatel-Lucent and SpeedCast have unveiled plans to market, deploy and operate a hosted DVB-H platform for mobile TV operators in Asia.

This joint initiative, which was announced last week at CommunicAsia 2008, Asia’s largest annual trade shows, aims to enable mobile TV service providers to deliver more than 20 TV channels via satellite (in the Ku-band or in the C-band) to their transmission towers for terrestrial broadcast (in the UHF band) to DVB-H handheld devices.

“This hosted mobile TV broadcast offering will help lower the risk to service providers associated with introducing a new service, while at the same time giving them the opportunity to provide their customers with attractively priced services and richer content offerings," said Pierre-Jean Beylier, Chief Executive Officer of SpeedCast Limited.

According to both companies, the solution combines all the elements required for a successful mobile TV service including the service platform, a security and encryption technology, the platform for encoding into a DVB-H compatible format, the satellite delivery to terrestrial infrastructure and a very large number of TV channels with world-class content -- across the major genres spanning news, music, sports, lifestyle and entertainment – which can be customized for different ethnic audiences.

"For cost-conscious mobile TV service operators, the key advantage of adopting a hosted approach is to avoid having to invest in head-end infrastructure, and therefore be able to concentrate their infrastructure investment on gradually increasing the density of their DVB-H or DVB-SH terrestrial transmission networks," said Frederic Rose, Alcatel-Lucent’s President of activities in the Europe, Africa and Asia region.

“By teaming-up with SpeedCast, Alcatel-Lucent is committed to allowing traditional as well as green-field operators accelerate their mobile TV delivery anywhere in Asia.”