Mobile TV broadcasters won’t suffer same fate as FLO TV
Oct 8, 2010 8:00 AM, By Michael Grotticelli
The Tivit dongle, just slightly smaller than a deck of cards, streams Mobile DTV broadcasts via WiFi to a compatible device. The device is being used as part of a Mobile DTV test in Washington, D.C.
With the news last week that Qualcomm was shutting down its FLO TV service, many immediately questioned whether broadcasters’ nascent Mobile DTV initiative might suffer the same fate. Do consumers really want to pay for video on their portable devices, and can broadcasters find a successful business model to make their investment pay?
The answers are not yet clear, but terrestrial stations now involved with putting a mobile signal on the air, and who plan to launch multichannel commercial services in earnest by the end of 2011, think the conditions they face are different than what Qualcomm was up against.
“We understand the pitfalls of what Qualcomm was up against, and we think that broadcasters have a significant advantage compared to what the FLO TV venture,” said Jay Adrick, vice president of broadcast technology at Harris Broadcast. His company has already supplied mobile TV transmission equipment to dozens of stations across the country and helped develop the A/153 Mobile Handheld (M/H) standard adopted by the ATSC that leverages the same spectrum now used by stations for their terrestrial TV channels. The standard is now casually referred to as “MDTV.”
For starters, the investment that Qualcomm had to make to build out the FLO TV service was in the billions of dollars compared with the roughly $130,000 stations must spend to add mobile DTV capability to their existing transmission infrastructure. There was also a high maintenance cost for operating multiple transmitters in every market it served (it was in about 60 DMAs as of this year) — including power bills and rental fees to lease space on three to five broadcasters’ transmission towers within a single market — and the FLO TV service was limited to 50kW ERP, compared with broadcasters’ 1mW. This allows most stations (not all) to cover their entire market with a single antenna.
“We could have a station on the air in Mobile DTV in about four hours,” Adrick said. “It took Qualcomm several years to get up to speed. That’s a big difference.”
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