After kicking the month off in Las Vegas at the CTIA Wireless (News - Alert) show, the opposing sides of the burgeoning cellular mobile TV market are heading back to Sin City to demonstrate their wares, this time at the National Association of Broadcasters’ annual NAB2006 confab.

 

The two camps pit a Qualcomm-led initiative entitled FLO, a multicasting technology used in the 700 MHz spectrum that stands for Forward Link Only, with the Digital Video Broadcasting for Handsets (DVB-H) format, a standards-based technology that using the 1.67 GHz band that has been predominantly developed in Europe.

 

 

But new to the scene is Sony Ericsson (News - Alert), which on Monday announced it has joined the Mobile DTV Alliance, the North America group representing DVB-H members. The handset maker joins a formidable list of sponsors including Intel (News - Alert), Microsoft, Motorola (News - Alert), Nokia (News - Alert), Texas Instruments and Modeo, the division of Crown Castle International that plans to officially launch commercial-grade multicast mobile broadcast in New York City and select major U.S. markets in 2006 and in the top 30 U.S. markets throughout 2007.

 

“History shows that global standards are critical to the success of the mobile industry, and we strongly believe this will also be the case for broadcast mobile TV,” said Scott Bloebaum, Deputy CTO, Sony Ericsson.

 

Other exhibitors in the DVB-H camp are:

But not to be outdone, Qualcomm announced on Monday that it is providing citywide coverage of FLO technology during NAB2006, just as it did during CTIA Wireless. In fact, the press release detailing the 16 multicast channels of QVGA-quality video content, audio content and data transmissions is nearly identical to the one the company issued earlier this month.

 

MediaFLO, the division of Qualcomm that has partnered with Verizon Wireless to deliver TV broadcasting by the fourth quarter of this year, is trying to drum up grassroots support for the technology with the formation of the FLO Forum in hopes to transform the proprietary technology into its own industry standard – a marketing concept very familiar to Qualcomm as evidenced by its CDMA technology.

 

“What we're really looking to do is jumpstart a marketplace of vendors,” Kamil Grajski, President of the FLO Forum, told TMCnet during a recent interview. Grajski will be presenting a FLO Forum overview at NAB2006 detailing the FLO technology and an update on the status of FLO standardization.

 

Of course, other players like communications hardware specialist Harris Corp. are taking no chances, adopting to both DVB-H and FLO formats. The communications systems giant on Monday announced that it will introduce a new line of television transmitters, the Harris Atlas Mobile and Ranger Mobile TV transmitters, at NAB2006 to support mobile television applications using FLO technology. But it is also introducing Cool Play 1670, a new television transmitter platform specifically designed for DVB-H applications, including the Modeo mobile TV service planned for the United States.

 

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.

Mobile Telephony