Mobile TV hits NAB

Mobility took the normally more TV-oriented National Association of Broadcasters conference by storm today, as a slew of mobile TV announcements from service providers, vendors and media companies signaled wireless's debut into the broadcasting industry.

The biggest announcement by far was Aloha Partners' revelation that it would be the third multicast mobile TV network in the U.S., which Telephony reported in this week's issue. Aloha is using the 700 MHz UHF spectrum in acquired in auction half a decade ago as the foundation for what it claims will be the most comprehensive mobile TV service in the country with double the capacity of its competitors Qualcomm's MediaFLO and Crown Castle's Modeo. It has 12 MHz of spectrum compared to MediaFLO's 6 MHz and Modeo's 5 MHz, allowing it to offer a much more extensive channel line up and more bundling packages to its carrier partners, said Scott Wills, president and chief operating officer of Aloha.

"Consumer research has shown that consumers are twice as likely to embrace mobile TV than a year ago, and the 700 MHz frequencies are ideally suited for this kind of service," Wills said. "We felt that with Qualcomm and Modeo in the marketplace, it was time for us to throw our hat in the ring."

The new service, called Hiwire, will eschew Qualcomm's Forward Link Only (FLO) technology for the standardized digital video broadcast-handheld (DVB-H) being backed by the Mobile DTV Alliance, Modeo and most European operators. On the content side, digital TV provider SES-Americom will supply the content encoding and delivery functions, using the same systems and satellite network it uses to supply digital streams to BellSouth and other IPTV providers. The network will go live this fall in its first trial market, Las Vegas.

Qualcomm may not have the spectrum assets of Hiwire, but it certainly had one edge over the operator at NAB: a fully operational FLO network blanketing the city. Though Qualcomm using Las Vegas as a test bed for its new TV service is news to no one, it made quite a splash at CTIA Wireless last month, coordinating demos with numerous handset and network infrastructure providers--everywhere you looked a FLO broadcast was staring you back in the face. Though FLO's presence at NAB isn't expected to be quite so omnipresent, it has upped its broadcast capacity to 16 channels and will be demoing the only live multicast TV capabilities at the conference. The DTV Alliance, however, had plenty of troops on hand at the show to make the case for DVB-H, including Motorola, Nokia and Texas Instruments, all are demonstrating concept phones powered by their DVB-H technologies, and the Alliance announced its newest member, Sony Ericsson.

On the network side, Harris Broadcast Communications unveiled a DVB-H transmission platform retooled for the 1670 MHz bands, the same radio astronomy spectrum used by Modeo. From the content community, Major League Baseball announced it had selected Anystream's digital publishing solution Agility to generate IP TV streams of all MLB's 2430 season games for distribution over multiple digital formats including mobile.