The Hindu Business Line : The birth of bonsai TV

The technology to bring broadcast TV to the mobile phone is here. But why would anyone want to watch live video this way? Anand Parthasarathy checks out the challenge and promise of Mobile TV.

The DVB-H standard for mobile TV has been adopted by many countries in Europe, Australia — and in Asia, by Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia and India.

Live broadcasts from four countries (including India), using the DVB-H standard for mobile phones, displayed at the BroadcastAsia show in Singapore recently. Anand Parthasarathy

Movies on the move!’, ‘TV that follows you!’, ‘Honey, I’ve shrunk the TV!’….. the media’s urge to cook up clever headlines when announcing new products and services aiming to bring television to the mobile phone and other hand-held devices has possibly misled as many readers as it has informed, in recent weeks. Potential customers can hardly be blamed for concluding that this was yet another unwanted technology being thrust on them by a hyperactive industry. After all, why would anyone want to watch one’s favourite television show this way?

But closer examination of what is being offered in dozens of countries, including India, might show that mobile TV is more than the ability to see news and movies on the move. Most of the players — both device makers as well as broadcast service providers — who are currently touting the attractions of TV on mobiles, are canny enough to realise that their offerings are not about to wean even a tiny fraction of family television viewers from their home-based sets. But they believe, or at any rate fervently hope, that what they have to offer might end up as ‘disruptive technology’, a term coined by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in 1995 to describe a new product, so compelling that it displaces whatever technology preceded it.

So where lies the potential for disruption in the television’s latest avatar? Mobile broadcast TV is defined as the transmission of audiovisual content over a broadcast (that is, one-to-many) network to portable devices such as mobile phones, laptop and notebook computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs), that are enabled to receive the signal. If it were just this, if it merely extended the reach of broadcast TV to portable and hand-held devices, mobile television would have died at birth. Its compelling proposition is two fold:

One: By using the broadcast techniques of television, it is much cheaper than the current technology of streaming video to individual mobile devices, where each recipient inefficiently downloads a separate copy of the content

Two: While the TV content reaches the mobile customer via the broadcast network, the primary service provider of the mobile device uses the cellular network to offer a ‘return path’ from customer to broadcast manager. This converts the passive television viewing — that most of us are familiar with — into a true interactive experience.

By integrating the one-to-many character of broadcast TV with the interactive potential of phone networks, and throwing in, as a bonus, the ability to marry the whole package to the Internet, mobile TV providers hope to offer an unbeatable combo of services that will go far beyond what is possible today — even with so called Third generation or 3G networks.

A variety of competing technologies and standards are available which make it possible to broadcast television signals to mobile devices. The US has generally adopted the Forward Link Only or FLO standard developed by Qualcomm. Early movers in Asia such as Japan and Korea have harnessed terrestrial and satellite-based technologies such as Digital Media Broadcast (DMB-T and DMB-S). China is deploying its home-brewed standard, Chibna Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting ( CMMB), and hopes to have it working in time for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

Going by current and announced deployments, the biggest share among worldwide competing technologies for mobile TV, according to a 2007 study by Wireless Media Strategies (WMS), might go to what is known as DVB or Digital Video Broadcast.

Nokia’s N 92, launched in India, the first handset enabled to receive DVB-H television broadcasts.

The DVB Project is an industry-led consortium of nearly 300 broadcasters, manufacturers and network operators in 35 countries aiming to create interoperable and open standards for the global delivery of digital media services. DVB-T is the project’s standard for digital television broadcast to terrestrial devices. DVB-H is the broadcast standard that enables the delivery of live broadcast TV to compatible hand-held devices. It can support up to 50 multiplexed channels at data rates of 0.2 to 0.5 megabits per second… this is considerably slower than the typical 4-5 MBPS that is achievable by DVB-T. The DVB-H standard for mobile TV has been adopted by many countries in Europe, Australia — and in Asia, by Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia and India. In May, Doordarshan launched pilot DVB-H-based services in parts of Delhi, from 5.30 a.m. to midnight, offering eight free channels, including DD National, DD News, DD Sports, DD Bharti as well as services in Urdu, Punjabi, Bangla and Tamil (Podhigai). Last month, the world’s biggest mobile handset maker, Nokia, launched in the entire Asia-Pacific region, what it called the world’s first DVB-H-enabled handset to receive such broadcasts — the model N 92.

Within days of the India launch, mobile TV services were also inaugurated in Malaysia. In an interesting illustration of the regional reach of DVB-H-based television services, Nokia set up a large pavilion at the recent BroadcastAsia show in Singapore where live TV feed for mobiles from India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam was displayed. Nearby, the DVB consortium brought together dozens of smaller players all offering services riding on the expected wave of mobile television applications.

“It’s personal in the same sense that the PC is personal computing”, explained Pawan Gandhi, Nokia’s Singapore-based head of Mobile TV and Video Experiences. “It is about the secure delivery of personal TV and video content, because it empowers the viewer in a way conventional TV never could. ‘Personal TV’ will reach consumers in Asia faster than any where else in the world. This is where it is all happening.” Jose-Luis Martinez, Nokia’s Vice-President for Multimedia sales in Asia-Pacific, added: “If the content is compelling, customers will not mind the small form factor of TV on mobiles.” He is willing to stick his neck out and predict: For millions of hitherto ‘unconnected’ people, the hand phone might emerge as the first platform on which they experience and harness not just telephony, but the Internet and television as well. But Gandhi and Martinez agree that for this to happen, the device itself has to become much more affordable: Early mobile-TV enabled handsets from Nokia, Samsung and others cost upward of Rs 30,000 or its equivalent.

An interesting study carried out at the London School of Economics (LSE) by Dr Shani Orgad has suggested how mobile television is transforming viewers’ experience and changing advertising (PDF version of the 24-page report: ‘This box was made for walking’, November 2006, is downloadable at www.nokia.com/NOKIA_COM_1/Press/Press_Events/mobile_tv_report

,_november_10,_2006/Mobil_TV_Report.pdf ).

Dr Orgad predicts that mobile TV will ultimately give way to a more personal and private TV experience than that of traditional broadcast TV, with a huge implication for users, content providers and advertisers. Users will be able to receive content anytime, anywhere, choose what is most relevant to them, even create their own TV content. People will watch mobile TV when commuting in public transport, when they are in a ‘waiting’ situation (traffic, doctor’s office), in school breaks — and in the privacy of their rooms at home. This will, in turn, influence content: news will become shorter, more focused, personalised.

There has never been a more compelling proposition than TV in your pocket, say its supporters. Clearly it has the potential to set off fundamental changes in the way we get our daily dose of infotainment. But will it happen as fast, as seamlessly and as disruptively as they are predicting? It may be too soon to say. May be ‘disruptive’ is overstating the case for mobile TV; It may be time, however, to prepare for the biggest incremental change in the technology of television since a Scottish engineer named John Logie Baird first demonstrated a ‘speaking tube’ in the early days of 1926, and an American, Philo Farnsworth, created the first practical picture transmission system less than a year later.

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The birth of bonsai TV