IPWireless and MobiTV team up

IPWireless and MobiTV today announced a partnership to jointly develop mobile TV technologies over IPWireless' TDtv multicast networks. The two plan to unveil a MobiTV service running over the vendor's Time Division-CDMA infrastructure by the end of June.

The deal has significant ramifications for both providers. IPWireless, a start-up vendor that is championing an alternate to wideband CDMA, is pushing its time-division duplexing gear in Europe and the U.S., hoping to gain traction with European carriers that hold UMTS licenses specifically allocated for TD technologies and with North American and other global providers looking for broadband wireless alternatives. Last month, IPWireless announced a low-cost downlink-only version of its TD-CDMA architecture that would effectively turn a cell into a broadcast site for streaming video and audio services. The technology is targeted squarely at carriers that want to own their own mobile TV networks instead of contract out with nationwide multicast providers like Qualcomm's MediaFlo USA or Crown Castle's Modeo or carriers that want to augment those national services with their own regional or premium content.

MobiTV is the most successful provider of the mobile TV services in the world, offering subscription-based services through multiple carriers on two continents. By lending its name to the partnership, MobiTV gives a hefty endorsement to IPWireless' TDtv technology. But MobiTV is likely to get a good deal out of the partnership, too. The same nationwide multicast TV providers IPWireless is challenging threaten MobiTV's business model. MediaFLO and Modeo will be built much like TV networks, broadcasting over separate networks and accessed through a receiver on the phone. Qualcomm and Crown Castle will sign their own content deals and provide their own infrastructure, potentially cutting MobiTV entirely out of the loop.

By giving IPWireless a business model to lay over its network technology, MobiTV can demonstrate the business case for a carrier to deliver its own TV content over its 3G network, either replacing or supplementing future broadcast content. Carriers are currently delivering MobiTV channels over 2.5G and 3G unicast networks, but since each user is establishing an individual high-capacity connection to the base station, the service eats up a lot of bandwidth. If the service truly gets its legs, multiple users on a single channel would take over all of the capacity of the network, especially in crowded urban cells. IPWireless's multicast technology, however, broadcasts the TV content over the entire swathe of spectrum. The service can handle unlimited users delivering 17 channels of QVGA-quality video over 5 MHz of spectrum.

"We are committed to delivering the MobiTV service on any platform and across any network," chairman and CEO Phillip Alvelda said in a statement. "These new network technologies will allow even more profitable delivery of our most popular stations in even the most crowded cities."

Since the partnership will be targeting many European carriers looking to use their unpaired UMTS spectrum in the 1900 MHz and 2010 MHz bands, MobiTV said it would develop a version of its media player and content server with the H.264 video codec, which is the standard defined by the 3GPP for video services.