First hosted DVB-H mobile TV service in Asia

SINGAPORE: Alcatel-Lucent and SpeedCast Ltd announced plans to jointly market, deploy and operate a shared, hosted DVB-H platform for mobile TV operators in Asia at the CommunicAsia 2008 and BroadcastAsia 2008 trade shows. The objective of the collaboration is to enable the seamless delivery of digital video content to operators for transmission to devices supporting the DVB-H mobile TV standard.

Alcatel-Lucent and SpeedCast will leverage their respective technologies, infrastructure and content delivery solutions to provide operators around the region with a state-of-the art DVB-H head-end. This hosted service, jointly operated by Alcatel-Lucent and SpeedCast, will enable mobile TV service providers to deliver more than 20 TV channels via satellite (in the Ku-band or in the C-band) to their transmission towers for terrestrial broadcast (in the UHF band) to DVB-H handheld devices.

This unique turnkey solution combines all the elements required for a successful mobile TV service including the service platform, a security and encryption technology, the platform for encoding into a DVB-H compatible format, the satellite delivery to terrestrial infrastructure and a very large number of TV channels with world-class content - across the major genres spanning news, music, sports, lifestyle and entertainment – which can be customized for different ethnic audiences.

This hosted managed service allows operators to drastically reduce the capital and operational expenditures associated with mobile TV service, and to leverage the economies of scale offered by a centralized platform. It also ensures a much faster time-to-market.

Pierre-Jean Beylier, CEO, SpeedCast, said: “This hosted mobile TV broadcast offering will help lower the risk to service providers associated with introducing a new service, while at the same time giving them the opportunity to provide their customers with attractively priced services and richer content offerings."

Frederic Rose, Alcatel-Lucent’s President of activities in the Europe, Africa and Asia region, added: "For cost-conscious mobile TV service operators, the key advantage of adopting a hosted approach is to avoid having to invest in head-end infrastructure, and therefore be able to concentrate their infrastructure investment on gradually increasing the density of their DVB-H or DVB-SH terrestrial transmission networks. By teaming-up with SpeedCast, Alcatel-Lucent is committed to allowing traditional as well as green-field operators accelerate their mobile TV delivery anywhere in Asia.”