Alcatel-Lucent and Speedcast have teamed up to jointly create a DVB-H platform for mobile TV operators in Asia. The two have said they’ll use their technologies, infrastructure and content delivery products to build the service, which they’ll market to operators in the region.

The pair’s service will cover: 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 the TV channels themselves.

There’s a lot of advantages in going for a hosted option - it takes a lot of the upfront costs out of the equation and means that you can test out the service without committing a load of cash. That said, it doesn’t leave much room for differentiating services across different operators, but at least it’s a relatively safe way of testing out DVB-H while the business models - not to mention the demand - for mobile TV are being sounded out.

It looks like Vodafone’s Germany head isn’t too impressed with mobile TV so far. After getting turned down for a mobile licence in the country, which went instead to Mobile 3.0, a consortium of publishers, the operator said it will now focusing its mobile TV efforts towards selling add ons. According to Forbes, Vodafone plans to offer services through which customers can buy products seen on mobile TV, such as songs aired on music television.

Another Forbes article reports the German head Fritz Joussen as saying he doesn’t see a viable business in offering pay television via mobile phones after the emergence of phones that receive regular terrestrial TV signals. “These devices came as a surprise and call a payment based subscription model into question,” he adds.

While I can’t help wondering why, if Vodafone was so unimpressed with mobile TV, it bid for a licence in the first place, but it’s right to pick up on the question of whether paid TV is the way forward. Vodafone has repeatedly championed the cause of mobile advertising - I’m surprised it hasn’t already starting giving away mobile TV clips in return for ad viewing. After all, it’s what we’re used to on terrestrial TV - we know the model works, why not export it to mobiles?

Could Qualcomm be thinking of bringing its MediaFLO mobile TV service to the UK? It’s shaping up to be a possibility after the company bought a slice of spectrum in the recent Ofcom auction.

According to Qualcomm, it’s now got its hands on the 40 MHz (1452-1492 MHz) of L-Band radio spectrum, for the princely sum of £8.3 million. It hasn’t given any definitive word on what the spectrum will be used for, except to say it will “bring a variety of innovative wireless technologies to the UK market”, along with its partners.

Needless to say, it’s keeping quiet on the partners and the services in question, but it’s worth noting that the press release the company’s put out about the spectrum quotes an exec with the clunky job title of “president of Qualcomm Internet Services, MediaFLO Technologies and Qualcomm Europe” - could that be a hint on what we’re about to see? After all, it’s got a bit of history over here with mobile TV, following a trial of MediaFLO in conjunction with Sky not so long ago.

And after all the talk, it looks like AT&T has stuck to its deadline and it’s going to be launching its broadcast mobile TV service - under the unsurprising brand name AT&T TV - from May 4, with two compatible devices, the LG Vu and the Samsung Access.

The service, based on Qualcomm’s MediaFLO, will go live in 58 cities, with the usual mix of broadcasters from the likes of CNN, Comedy Central, MTV and Fox, with the usual mix of movies, news, comedy, and music content being promised.

At least now we get a chance to see the pricing: and it’s $15 a month, which seems rather ambitious on AT&T’s part. How long before it switches to an advertising (free content in return for ads) or bundled (all the data you can eat and mobile TV thrown in for good measure) model?

Looks like the Dish Network conundrum is finally settled - the company is indeed getting into the mobile TV game, after announcing it’s teaming up with Alcatel-Lucent to test a system based on the DVB-SH standard.

The test looks like it’s just a small one without any consumers involved - according to the pair, the trial will take place in Dish’s labs from May to August with a view to finding out how well it performs and how much it costs.

The trial seems a little on the small side for anyone seriously thinking about getting into mobile TV any time soon. But if Dish really is just testing the water without a full scale rollout in mind, why did it buy a great big chunk of 700Mhz spectrum recently?

Analysts have been polishing their crystal balls over mobile TV and they reckon that it could soon be a top notch way of delivering adverts. A new report from Juniper Research has found that this year, mobile TV will earn $335 million in ad revenues while by 2013, that figure will reach $2.5 billion. The whole mobile ad market will be $7.6 billion according to the analysts.

By 2010, mobile TV will also be the most lucrative channel for mobile advertising, although idle screen advertising will also do well, with ad spend $7 million this year and up to $500 million in 2013.

If mobile is the biggest generator of ad revenue, it looks like we can expect more free channels and programming on the way. If there’s one thing that could open up mobile TV more than anything else - be it good handsets, clever standards, and so on - then it’s possibility advertisers will make sure we can watch TV gratis. As long as we can get over all those annoying ads…

Regardless of how mobile TV has performed to date, it looks like more and companies can’t wait to get involved. According to AP, the Open Mobile Video Coalition - a collection of owners of over 800 local TV stations - is testing three broadcast mobile TV standards.

The group will provide recommendations for a standard to standards body Advanced Television Systems Committee and hopes to have it approved by next February, when the US will switch off its analogue TV signal.

It looks like there could be a new trend in mobile TV broadcasting: both the Open Mobile Video Coalition and ICO Global Communications are launching mobile TV services but want to sell them as suitable for other devices, as well as mobiles, like in-car entertainment systems or laptops. By increasing its potential market beyond mobile devices, could this give mobile TV the push it needs for mass market take-up? Or is it a sign that purely mobile TV isn’t viable?

ICO Global Communications has announced its launched a new satellite that will allow it to start offering new mobile services later on in this year. The satellite, called ICO.G1, went up yesterday from Cape Canaveral, and reached its orbit later that afternoon.

The satellite will let ICO provide services including mobile TV, navigation and emergency assistance service “to be known as ICO mim (mobile interactive media)” across the US, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

According to the Washington Post, the company reckons its mobile TV service will be different to others on the market because it will reach even the most remote parts of the US. Add in the two way communications the standard allows, and it looks like ICO has an interesting service on its hands. Don’t expect it to turn up on your mobile any time soon - the company is using a standard that hasn’t really been adopted yet.

You know things can’t be all good with mobile TV when one of its biggest proponents - Nokia favours the DVB-H standard - admits that rollout aren’t going as well as the company had hoped.

Head of internet services t the Finnish handset maker, Niklas Savander, told Reuters that broadcast mobile TV “is a bit in turmoil… We have seen that there are multiple segments who are not interested in the broadcasting, but rather in downloads. Roll out is slower than also we anticipated a couple of years ago.”

Nokia may not have predicted it, but from the time mobile TV started being discussed, a lot of other people did. The success of downloads is probably due not only to their greater accessibility - everyone can get 3G, not everyone can get DVB-H programming - but also it seems to suit mobile usage patterns better. A three minute snack TV program is handy when you’re waiting for the bus, a 30 minute broadcast TV program less so.

Remember all the discussion over what the recent 700 MHz spectrum auction would yield for the mobile industry? Well, at least part of that question has been answered: Qualcomm is using its newly won spectrum to broaden the capacity of its MediaFLO TV service, after spending $558.1 million in the auction.

The company said Qualcomm said the licences will let it offer more MediaFLO content in areas including Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia and San Francisco. The company has also got new spectrum around its office to help with R&D efforts.

Mobile TV is still an uncertain bet - anything that can help whip up some more interest from users can only be a good thing. Hopefully the capacity boost will let Qualcomm do some serious work on differentiating its content from what’s available on the home TV.

AT&T has revealed it will be bringing Qualcomm’s MediaFLO mobile TV technology to users’ phones by May. FLO will launch on AT&T’s network this May on two new devices, the LG Vu and the Samsung Access.

AT&T said the service will feature two exclusive TV channels, but didn’t give any more information on their content. The operator did say however that it will offer full-length television content and sporting events and programming from leading entertainment brands CBS Mobile, Comedy Central, ESPN Mobile TV, FOX Mobile, MTV, NBC 2GO, NBC News2Go and Nickelodeon.

While there still seems to be a lot of skepticism from several quarters on whether mobile TV is a goer, the networks at least seem to be convinced. I can’t help but think that AT&T will need to add a lot more devices to its line up before too long if it wants to take mobile TV anywhere beyond a niche product.

The US could be getting another mobile TV service, according to The Financial Times. The paper quotes analysts as saying broadcaster Dish Networks “could be considering launching a mobile TV service to compete with the leading US mobile phone companies” after bidding at the US 700 Mhz spectrum auction and winning enough licences to “create a nationwide footprint”.

The speculation the spectrum will be used for mobile TV rather than voice or data stems from the nature of the spectrum Dish, through a company called Frontier Wireless, bought: the spectrum is suited to video but can’t handly two way communication.

But whether that actually translates to mobile TV remains to be seen. After all, few broadcast mobile TV services are up and running commercially, let alone are bringing in the revenue. Dish so far has refused to comment on its plans for the spectrum. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if there’s more mobile TV on the way.

I came across Porto Media whilst I was sat on the Heathrow Express this afternoon in a promotional video by IBM. (You can, incidentally, see the video here… IBM haven’t quite entered the 2.0 age — the video is simply a Quicktime download link so I can’t embed it here).

Here’s how it works:

The Movie Key is a USB stick. You plug it into these ATM style ‘moviepoint’ machines and download your movie of choice there and then. Smart.

It’s using Microsoft Windows digital rights management stuff so the movie will expire after a few days and the movie companies can relax about content control.

The thing that struck me when watching the video was that it would be rather convenient to use your mobile instead of a USB Stick. Theoretically speaking, actually, you could probably get a Nokia N95 8Gb to work with this service. You’d have to wait a little while for the movie to download to it though, even by USB… it’d probably take ages.

Still, i like the concept of being able to ‘plug my mobile’ into a moviepoint ATM and rent a few movies to watch at home later on. Or on the plane. Or wherever.

Good news for Nokia, not so great news for Qualcomm and MediaFLO: the European Commission has given the Nokia-backed DVB-H mobile TV standard the official thumbs up by adding it to the EU List of Standards. Now, member states “will be required to encourage the use of DVB-H”.

The Commission has also hinted that it won’t accept proprietary behavious from those involved in DVB-H, saying it wants to see ‘”transparent intellectual property rights regime, based on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and allowing low price of devices” and a transparent patent pool.

It always looked like the Commission was going to give DVB-H the nod, so this week’s announcement isn’t exactly a surprise, but I suspect will still be provoking some glass-raising at Nokia HQ. However, there are still the questions around spectrum, devices and consumer take-up for that matter to be solved before DVB-H actually gets into people’s pockets so don’t hold your breath for broadcast mobile TV any time soon.

Mobile TV could soon be coming to the UK, with the news that Ofcom is planning to release spectrum which it says is appropriate for mobile telly. It plans to sell off the spectrum by auction, scheduled for the end of this April, while operators will need to get their applications in by 10 April.

The so-called L-Band spectrum, 1452 - 1492 MHz, can be used for “mobile multimedia services including mobile TV which could be deployed using a variety of technologies” Ofcom said. The spectrum will be sold off on a technology neutral basis and licences will be tradeable.

With almost all of the operators piloting some form of broadcast TV, I wonder if this release of spectrum will the auction winner move from test phase to a full-on commercial service launch.

Always one for pushing the boundaries, Helio Mobile have done a deal with Isabella Rossellini to offer her 8-part Green Porno adventure series on their ‘Give A Damn’ channel.

Green Porno is not Jenna Jameson with a reduced carbon footprint. No. It’s a ‘comical but insightful study of the curious ways certain creatures (insects, mainly) make love’.

So there will definitely be a bit about the female spider killing the male. Count on that.

“I’ve always been interested in animals and animal behavior,” said Rossellini. “I wanted people to laugh, but then to leave and say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know about that.’ That was my green intervention. It was to make people aware of animal life.”

The Green Porno minisite, sundancechannel.com/greenporno, will feature all 8 films and exclusive web only interviews with Isabella Rossellini and the cast and crew, exclusive photo galleries of behind the scenes shots, making of footage and samples of Isabella Rossellini’s hand drawn storyboards. The exclusive web content also explores the challenges and opportunities associated with creating short films for ’small screens’ — namely the internet and mobile devices.

What does Helio think of it?

“Green Porno has the right balance of entertainment and education for our members,” said Rob Gelick, Vice President of Media and Community Services at Helio. “The series will be available across all of Helio’s devices and featured in the ‘Give A Damn’ channel which offers the best mobile content themed around socially conscious issues.”

More details here.

Related to the previous post about IMMI, my attention was piqued today by news that Zenith and Nielsen are joining together to offer an end-to-end service that will deliver advertising performance insight across ‘three screens’.

(Three screens = television, internet and mobile.)

I’ve always thought that the awful, awful truth must really hurt with the likes of mobile and internet video measurement. More so with video.

I wonder just how the stats look. No doubt, people are watching television and video on their mobile handsets. No doubt. Just… it’s hardly in the millions.

I wonder, for example, how the pinstriped nike-wearing media executives in New York react to getting their report and wondering if 6.7 daily viewers is measured in millions or, if 6.7 is the actual figure.

I think it’s smart that these companies are uniting their services. Just, while mobile video is in its infancy, I doubt many of their clients are going to want to actually look at the equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes. The various ratings that we’re all used to — the ‘18 million people watched EastEnders last night’ stats — are going to be vastly, vastly different when it comes to analysing mobile television viewing habits.

The services being adopted by Zenith Media are all part of Nielsen’s Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement (A2/M2) initiative, which was launched by Nielsen in response to the expansion of television programming to a variety of digital platforms. A2/M2 will allow Nielsen and its clients to “follow the video” to multiple media delivery systems, both inside and outside the home.

“We believe that it isn’t about linear television anymore,” said Peggy Green, Vice Chairman Zenith Media. “It is about following video content, content that can be viewed out of the home, on the net and on-mobile devices. We believe that Nielsen’s skill in media research will help us understand the depth and breadth of audiences across multiple platforms. This is just one step we are taking to master the new world of video content.”

More at http://www.nielsen.com/

Came across this company today during a bit of research into mobile video advertising measurement:

Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI) is the developer of an end-to-end media measurement system that links media exposure to consumer action. Using a mobile-phone-based digital monitoring system, IMMI tracks almost all media 24/7 and helps businesses evaluate the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. IMMI is based in San Mateo, Calif. More information is available at www.immi.com.

I’m going to look into their offerings more detail shortly. I’ve been interested in how people use mobile video on their handsets — and, more importantly, how companies measure the ‘impressions’ of this. I wonder, for example, what can be recorded by IMMI whilst I’m sat watching a 5 minute video that constantly buffers. Do I count as an impression, even if I’ve not been able to actually watch the stream?

While all the ongoing specultion about where Motorola is going with its handset business trundle along in the background, the company is still laying down some cash for mobile investments. Motorola’s investment arm, Motorola Ventures has revealed its put some money into Quantum, a company that makes devices and software for DVB-H mobile broadcasting, although there’s no figure given on just how much Moto is investing.

It’s interesting to see investments in mobile TV that aren’t specifically targeted at mobile phones themselves, instead Quantum specialises in media-player type devices. However, the software it makes will doubtless interest mobile operators - it comes with the type of content protection software (read DRM) that record labels and movie studios are very keen on.

Whatever Motorola decides on handsets, it makes sense for Motorola to continue dipping its toe into mobile telly - it struck a deal with Nokia to co-operate on DVB-H development back in 2006 and it’s set top box business is still looking healthy. Perhaps there’s room for Moto to cross-breed Quantum’s mobile TV players with its own phones?

Mobile video broadcasters Kyte have found themselves on the business end of $21.1 million of investment, led by the likes of Steamboat Ventures and Intellect Capital Ventures, linked with Disney and TeliaSonera respectively.

Kyte’s business model is all about distributing mobile and online video to destinations including phones, social networks and blogs for viral marketing campaigns. It’s currently being used by music industry figures like 50 Cent to distribute video to fans, who can then interact with the content by way of Kyte Player on their PC or, if they’re on a mobile, through the iPhone-optimised Kyte Mobile Web.

If Kyte’s backers are anything to go by - Telefónica, Nokia Growth Partners, DoCoMo Capital and Swisscom to name a few - the company’s video broadcasting will go down well with the operators.

ABIresearch seems to think that by 2012, the Mobile TV market will boast nearly half a billion subscribers. With 3G coverage expanding around the globe and the increased build-out of mobile TV networks, the research firm believes that more content will be available and consumers will naturally gravitate towards these advanced services.

ABIresearch sees the Asia-Pacific market being the biggest leader, growing from 24 million users in 2007 to ten times that amount by 2012. North America is also singled out, as both Verizon and AT&T, the two leading operators with a combined total of over 130 million subscribers, plan to have their Mobile TV networks ready to rock by the end of 2008.

I think it will be interesting, especially as the U.S. is using Qualcomm’s MediaFLO technology and the rest of the world is using DVB-H and other similar variants for their mobile TV.

Orange and T-Mobile have announced it’s time for another mobile pilot. The two operators will use NextWave Wireless’ UMTS MBMS based TDtv product for a six month trial, which will reuse some spare spectrum that all operators bar Vodafone were awarded when they bought their 3G licences.

The pilot will see West Londoners getting square-eyed with up to 24 TV channels and 10 digital radio stations. No word on what will be available to watch, except that there will some of the “most popular broadcast and premium television channels”.

Orange and T-Mobile will be asking other European operators and handset makers to join in with the experiment as observers.

Things are certainly looking promising for TDtv - this is the second trial both operators have conducted incorporating the company’s technology. The results from last one, which took place in Bristol, were “extremely encouraging” to boot - hopefully we’ll be hearing more about how competing standards are faring as MWC goes along.

With Orb running up to 5 million users, I wanted to give you an idea of why so many are starting to realize the value in media being served from the cloud, such as Orb does, versus locally stored data. I’ve been an Orb, er, member for a long time, but never quite got it to work. The problem was I was attempting to use AT&T’s EDGE network, which simply isn’t suitable for streaming video content. However, when I got my Nokia N95-3, which supports AT&T’s 3G HSDPA network, I decided to give it another go, and I’m completely floored.

The problem, currently, with locally stored video content, is the need for conversion. An .AVI movie file of say, The Princess Bride, is 713MB. Even if my mobile device was able to play that natively, that’s quite a bit of memory to suck up. So, to play it on my N95, for instance, I would need to convert it using something like Smartmovie or Divx Converter, which shrinks it down to a more manageable 70-80MB, without losing video quality. The problem is that now I have 2 copies of my movie - one for the PC and one for my mobile. I can’t really only convert what I want, when I want it, because that takes time.

This is where services such as Orb really start to shine. I have all of Season 3 of The Office (the U.S. one, sorry Brits). I want the convenience of being able to watch The Office on either my PC, N810 Internet Tablet, or N95, on demand, at any given moment. Even if I’m at home, Orb makes that simple and efficient by converting on the fly.

In fact, I often use Orb to stream video to my N810 while I’m cooking in the kitchen. I have full access to my entire video library, without having to convert anything, or worry about having enough space on my memory card.

The limitations, however, are obviously the internet connection requirement. If I’m disconnected, so is my media. However, as airlines are starting to add WiFi access to their features list, how much longer will there be completely disconnected places?

Are you finding it better to locally store video content on your device, after having converted it, or do you think that soon enough it will all be served from the cloud?

SRS Labs, the guys who can make nearly any set of computer speakers sound awesome, announced a new tech called ‘SRS CS Headphone’ that is supposed to bring stereo surround sound to your mobile phone, through the headphones, with no hardware tweaks.

I’m not watching nearly as many movies on my phone as I did in college, but my Nokia N810 Internet Tablet + Orb is a rocking solution, I’d love to be able to plug my headphones in and get even BETTER sound. It’s already available to license, so hopefully Orb can pick it up, or someone else that wants to implement it quickly.

Full Release

O2 and 3 have decided to unite their mobile video platforms - bringing LookAtMe! and SeeMeTV together under the EyeVibe brand. The operators said they were taking a leaf out of the book of SMS and MMS by making the technology work across operators, with the hope of getting more consumers on board as a result.

Users of Eyevibe will now be able to post video, comment on others’ clips and use messaging regardless of whether they are customers of O2 or 3. To date, LookAtMe! and SeeMeTV - both developed by Yospace - have earned their users £800,000 on 60,000 clips uploaded and generate on average 28 million page impressions a month.

With the business models for some areas of mobile telly still a little on the uncertain side, it’s likely that there we’ll see even more of these type of sharing deals in the future, particularly when it comes to broadcast infrastructure.