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Lemak Lemang

A walk down the Yellow Brick Road of Malaysia's Corridor of the future

by Jeff Ooi, Malaysia

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Mobile TV: Ready for a personal multimedia experience?

Mar 31, 2007 08:59

The timing couldn't have been more perfect!

Just as Nokia was plugging in Kuala Lumpur for Mobile TV as the new frontier of a personal multimedia experience, BBC announced in London that its TV and radio channels will be available on some mobile phones for a trial period staring this April.

At the Digital TV Symposium organized by the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU), Nokia's Jawahar Kanjilal said Mobile TV is set to become a multimedia experience, giving users the ability to interact with their own devices and personalize the content shared among fellow users.

The symposium, themed "Path to Implementation", was held from March 26 to 29 in the Malaysian capital city. Sponsors include such luminary names as the French Government, Kordia, Nokia, Sony, Panasonic, Tandberg Television, Tektronix, Broadcast Australia, DVB, Genesis Networks, GlobeCast, Rohde & Schwarz, Technomedia, Thomson and Toshiba.

One of the key messages transmitted at the symposium was that Mobile TV should be seen as a personal broadcast experience for consumers who have come to expect convergence of several different devices into a single unit.

Incidentally, the mobile phone emerges to be the key terminal of choice as the BBC has included in its plan that for an initial 12 months, a range of broadcast content will be syndicated to key networks in the UK--Vodafone, Orange and 3.

In the BBC Mobile TV trial project, subscribers to their TV packages will be able to watch BBC One, BBC News 24 and BBC Three, with the exception of some sports and bought-in programs.

Subscribers will also be receiving to up to eight BBC radio stations including Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 6 Music, BBC 7 and Asian Network.

The BBC said the trial will provide a test to determine the effectiveness of both the 3G network and the demand for BBC channels. Besides, BBC believed it will also help shape its future mobile strategy.

Over in KL, the Nokia spokesman said today's consumers are expectant of Mobile TV services wherever they have mobile reception.

According to Kanjilal, Nokia foresees that Mobile TV programming will comprise both broadcast content, and user-generated content in driving the take-up rate and growth of the new medium, with Internet continuing to provide the girdling market push. Hence the buzzword: Convergence.

Common standard
Now comes the big question in implementation: Open standards.

At CeBit earlier in March, European Commission (EC) telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding issued a stern warning to proponents of Mobile TV to agree on adopting a single technology standard without futher delay.

If the industry failed to do so, she said she would do it for them.

Her underlying tone was that Europe, where mobile giants like Nokia and Ericsson reside, would risk losing a chance to be a global player in the burgeoning Mobile TV market if the they can't agree on a common standard.

Apparently, Reding's idea of a single technology is DVB-H, the standard for global Mobile TV which was developed with almost 40 million euros (US$53 million) of EC research funds.

It was noted that DVB-H is already in use in 17 EU nations, and industry players are pushing it as an open standard to other stakeholders, including members of the European Mobile Broadcasting Council (EMBC).

I played around with an actual Mobile TV device, streaming from live broadcast, when I visited the LG research center in Seoul recently. Running on Korea's CDMA2000 network, the download speed and audio-visual quality appeared marvelous--I was watching the familiar Korean Wave soap opera, to be exact!

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About Jeff Ooi

Jeff Ooi is an Internet and e-Business consultant based in Kuala Lumpur who's spent the last four years blogging internationally on the tech scene, on anything and nothing. Which doesn't really explain why most of his own technology is about three years out of date. He doesn't even own a PDA after his Palm V crashed. He's on 3G, though... Lemak Lemang refers to coconut-flavored sticky rice stuffed in a bamboo container.