BANGALORE, INDIA: We really can't say whether 2008 is going to be the year of Mobile TV or not. But, this year is expected to witness a rapid growth in the adoption of this new entertainment medium. Key players have already launched their Mobile TV services across the globe.
Motorola is one among them. The company recently launched its Mobile TV device with advanced navigation capabilities. In an interaction with CIOL, Venkat Eswara, senior marketing manager, Networks & Enterprise, Motorola talks in detail about the technologies and broadcast methods of Mobile TV and also about the growth direction.
Excerpts from the interview:
Lots of trials and rollouts worldwide! Is India ready for Mobile TV?
Different broadcast technologies like DVB-H, ISDB-T, DMB use L-band – VHF and UHF spectrum. License to broadcast digital content over this band is currently happening in regions like EMEA, APAC and NA.
We believe India is prime for this market once the regulatory bodies allow the digital broadcast in the spectrum, especially considering the appetite for consumers towards content and mobile solutions.
Can you tell us something about the two delivery methods-broadcast and unicast- and how these two markets are growing? What are the challenges involved with these two methods?
The unicast network provides content to an end user on a one-on-one basis based on point-to-point connection on a dedicated transmission over a wireless network like cellular, Wi-Fi, and WiMAX.
Unicast services are best suited for user-selected and on-demand content service. The challenge with unicast service is that the network must allocate an increased number of resources to support multiple point-to-point links as the number of subscribers grows. Also, as the video is over the same spectrum of existing voice and data applications, increased subscribers on a network could potentially degrade the quality of service.
As service providers look to scale a unicast-based service, it is very important to efficiently optimize the network for bandwidth usage.
