Monday, April 16, 2007

DVB-H Information in Hebrew

Orange Israel has an excellent website about the history and future of communications, which explains many technologies and buzzwords in mobile and wireless communication in simple terms, using beautiful flash animations. On the website you can find information in Hebrew about DVB-H, GPS, NFC, H.264, MIMO, and many others.

Friday, April 13, 2007

80M Mobile Broadcast TV Subscribers by 2011

eMarketer published a new market research report this week, predicting that by 2011, 80M users worldwide will pay for mobile broadcast TV services. It is interesting to compare this forecast with the data from In-Stat published on the same day, predicting 125M mobile broadcast TV users worldwide by 2011 (however, this number may include free mobile TV services as well). Another interesting comparison would be with eMarketer's own research from last year, which predicted 100M mobile broadcast TV subscribers by 2009.

eMarketer is also forecasting that by 2011, an additional 120M users will pay for mobile video and TV services delivered over cellular networks, and that the total number of mobile video and TV users, including both paid and free services, will increase from 40M users in 2006 to 754M users in 2011.

In terms of revenues, eMarketer is forecasting a total revenue of $12.7B for mobile video and TV services, comprising of $5B from cellular video and TV services, and $7.7B from mobile broadcast TV subscription.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

New US Mobile TV Standard Under Development

EETimes has reported that the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), the US standards group responsible for digital TV, is developing a new standard for mobile TV called ATSC-M/H (ATSC-Mobile/Handheld). The standard will be targeted at the delivery of TV services to mobile and handheld devices, and is designed to be backward-compatible with the existing ATSC digital terrestrial TV standard. ATSC is currently used in the US to provide High-Definition TV broadcasts to TVs in the home.

The ATSC-M/H standard is actually the third standard being proposed for extending the existing ATSC broadcasts in the US market for mobile reception. The two other standards are A-VSB promoted by Samsung and Rohde & Schwarz, and MPH proposed by LG and Harris.