Big Screen Tv Stands

Byline: Jason Ankeny

If some big-shot Hollywood producer ever decides to make a feature film about the early years of the mobile video market, it would be important to understand that there is no movie. There is only a movie trailer, a two-minute highlight reel documenting the nascent technology's transformation into a box-office smash.

Sure, three-hour Cinerama epics represented the heyday of the silver screen, but it's byte-sized entertainment - blink-and-you'll-miss-them weather forecasts, sports clips, cartoons and the like - that will dominate what might be called the "sliver screen" of mobile video. Few experts believe that wireless subscribers will ever desire to download video content that is as long as the average sitcom, let alone a feature-length film. But even with massive IMAX theatres dotting the metropolitan landscape and large-screen, high-definition televisions dominating family rooms, the most lucrative opportunity facing content providers hinges not on screens that are larger than life, but on handset displays the size of a saltine cracker. Virtually overnight, mobile video has emerged as the wireless application du jour, and everyone - carriers, handset-makers, chip developers and content aggregators alike - is entering the picture.

In its current form, mobile video is at best a primitive application, limited not only in the relatively narrow scope of content available to subscribers but also by technological restraints. The current market leader, Idetic's MobiTV multimedia service, is offered by Sprint PCS and Cingular (by way of its recent acquisition of AT&T Wireless) and delivers about 600 new video clips per day across 12 channels from partners including NBC, FOX News and the Weather Channel. The problem is that its frame rates are at most six to 10 frames per second, far off the pace of the 10 to 15 frames-per-second rate generally considered the bare minimum necessary to create the illusion of motion. (At its inception in late 2003, however, MobiTV delivered subscribers frame rates of just 1 to 2 per second, marking a significant improvement in just a year's time.)

A series of recent developments and announcements promises to accelerate mobile video's evolution even further. In the span of about a month late last year, Qualcomm said it would build an $800 million nationwide mobile video and multimedia multicasting network, called MediaFLO, scheduled to go live in late 2006; Texas Instruments announced plans to introduce Hollywood, a chip promising mobile video resolution comparable to today's digital television broadcasts by 2007; and Nokia and tower operator Crown Castle inaugurated a Pittsburgh-area trial of DVB-H, the mobile TV standard already dominant in Europe.

"You wouldn't see this level of activity if operators didn't see the opportunity," said Jeff Lorbeck, vice president and general manager of Qualcomm's MediaFLO.

According to consulting firm A.T. Kearney, that opportunity portends annual revenues of $30 billion in the U.S., with consumer spending in excess of $20 per month. A survey conducted in Germany by Vodafone and Nokia reported that 80% of consumers want TV on their wireless phones and would pay in excess of 12 euros (roughly $15 U.S.) per month for the privilege. Similar studies spearheaded by Sony Ericsson indicate interest from about 40% of subscribers. The question is whether U.S. consumers will follow suit. Respondents to a recent Yankee Group survey placed mobile video low on their wishlist of wireless applications.

"There are a lot of challenges," said Qualcomm's Rob Chandhok, vice president of engineering for MediaFLO. "You won't get to a place where there's mass-market adoption until you work really hard on usability."

While wireless carriers always expected mobile video to star on their decks, the plot took more than a few twists along the way. Given that the promise of 3G rested in large part on its capacity for video delivery, few could have anticipated that both Qualcomm and TI would create dedicated mobile video technologies, let alone promote those technologies as a means to offload video content from 3G networks. While current 3G speeds should rise in the next several years to enable faster frame rates and improve the overall user experience, 4G-and its potential to achieve the 30 frames-per-second speeds of digital TV-remains at least a decade away.

The overseas success of mobile video and related multimedia content convinced Qualcomm there was no time like the present to make a move.

"Once Asian operators began offering multimedia services, it became apparent there was incredible excitement within the end-user market," Lorbeck said. "Many early services were categorized as on-demand, where the user is requesting a particular video clip or audio clip. But we believe there will be demand for a much greater volume of multimedia content, and although 3G networks are capable of providing tremendous ability to transmit that content to end users, there is a way for a particular category of service to provide even lower-cost delivery of multimedia content. In particular, we saw that a technology like FLO could dramatically lower the cost of delivery to the end user and really drive the adoption of multimedia services."

An 11-year Qualcomm vet, Lorbeck previously led the company's Technology Adventures Group, a division coupling corporate R&D with venture capital investment. MediaFLO began as a research project within the Technology Adventures Group but grew so quickly that it was soon named a distinct business unit in its own right, MediaFLO USA. The MediaFLO network will operate on Qualcomm's proprietary FLO (which stands for Forward Link Only) multicasting technology, which forgoes the on-demand/individual bit stream approach of previous mobile video technologies in favor of multicasting, which transmits content to users in a one-to-many fashion at no incremental cost to subscribers.

"With MediaFLO, we can squeeze every bit of capacity to deliver multimedia, which is very important because we're trying to deliver service at a price point attractive to a large number of consumers," Chandhok said. "I could deliver these services over EV-DO or W-CDMA, but the cost structure would be different than what I can achieve using this overlay FLO network. We can deliver service cheaper this way."

The MediaFLO network will ultimately operate over the 700 MHz spectrum (UHF channel 55) frequencies that Qualcomm acquired at FCC auction in June 2003. The completed network will support 50 to 100 national and local content channels, including about 15 live streaming channels and numerous audio channels. MediaFLO will also offer what Qualcomm calls "clip-casting": "That is network-scheduled delivery of content," Lorbeck said. "The FLO system can support real-time delivery of content as well as the network-scheduled delivery of content. Imagine that there is a multiplicity of real-time, 24/7 linear-feed streaming channels, along with other channels that are not time-sensitive - a recipe of the day, perhaps, or a cartoon of the day. Instead of providing channel capacity for a live streaming 24/7 channel, that content can be pushed to the network and stored on the handset and viewed at the appointed time."

Another unique wrinkle of the MediaFLO network is its efficiency. The system will provide coverage via high-power transmitters positioned atop tall towers, an approach Qualcomm claims will require about 30 to 50 times fewer towers than typical cellular and higher frequency-based networks.

"That's one of the main drivers of our cost reduction," Chandhok said. "Our modeling shows that per market, the average number of transmitters is two and a half."

Chandhok said he doesn't anticipate any challenges in building the MediaFLO network.

"It's a lot like deploying a low-powered or medium-powered television station, and a lot of people already know how to do that," he said. "Power consumption, physical characteristics like antennae and user experiences like what happens when you're watching TV and you get a voice call... those are the challenges we face, and we're hard at work on them."

With a little less than two years remaining before MediaFLO goes live, Qualcomm has time to iron out those wrinkles and more - but the clock is ticking.

"We have an incredible task in front of us in completing the technology development and getting the system deployed," Lorbeck said. He anticipates an influx of new faces in the wireless space. "Some partners may be different," Lorbeck said. "Our value chain will include contract providers. They are an essential element of an end-to-end service offering. Any service is only as good as the content you're providing, and content partners will do a significant part in creating awareness of this technology."

The impact of Qualcomm's FLO technology will be determined in large part by the penetration of DVB-H, a European-based open standard developed by a consortium called the Digital Video Broadcast Project and finalized in 2004. Like FLO, DVB-H is a multicasting technology, albeit one that operates via "time-slicing," a technique that temporarily shuts down tuner chips between broadcast blasts.

"A lot of people who studied video deployments over the existing cellular infrastructure saw it's not as economically feasible as people once thought," said Kush Parikh, worldwide strategic marketing manager for mobile connectivity solutions at TI. "If you're using up a lot of your bandwidth for deploying video, you're chewing up bandwidth that can be used for profitable voice calls. The operators and handset OEMs said, 'Maybe we should create a broadcast network'-in this case, DBV-H. TI wanted to put its name out there because there's always been this building momentum. There are DVB-H trials in Pittsburgh, Berlin and Oxford, England, and you'll see more in 2005. We wanted to go out and aggressively go after this market."

Announced in October 2004, Hollywood captures live digital TV transmissions for broadcast over mobile handsets, leveraging TI's digital RF processor technology to integrate the traditional three-chip solution - i.e., tuner, OFDM demodulator and channel decoder processor - into a single chip.

"The Hollywood chip is effectively an RF receiver - it takes the broadcast signal in, does the standard processing and then passes a streaming bit signal over to a host processor," Parikh said. "The host processor is responsible for determining frames per second and resolution on-screen, making sure all video is formatted properly for the handset."

Projected for arrival in mobile devices in 2007, Hollywood promises playback in the 24 to 30 frames-per-second range and is created to interface with TI's OMAP processor technology.

"Mobility is not a trivial thing," Parikh said. "Watching the handset while you're walking or driving a car or in a train, if you're moving at a fast rate, getting a clean signal is a lot tougher, so you need to have some extremely advanced technology to make sure you're receiving the signal cleanly. You might have five, six or seven different frequencies coming into or going out of your phone simultaneously, like GSM, GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and digital TV. To get clean video signal in regards to fluid motion, you need to have some very advanced host-processing architectures, tightly coupled into the platform-dedicated accelerators devoted to that technology."

Although TI's Hollywood chip is standards-agnostic, the company is clearly hitching the chip to DVB-H's star, stressing its belief that open, non-proprietary standards will enjoy the greatest market stake. Already dominant in Europe, DVB-H appears to hold the edge in the U.S. as well: While the MediaFLO network is still two years from its premiere, Nokia and Crown Castle lifted the lid off DVB-H in October 2004 with a collaborative trial in the Pittsburgh area, testing the standard in the 1.6 GHz frequency band that Crown Castle owns nationwide.

"DVB-H has a distinct advantage as a legacy technology that people have been working on for years," Parikh said. "Crown Castle's spectrum is nationwide - Qualcomm spectrum is not nationwide and is in a frequency band where analog TV is being broadcast. They don't have carte blanche in terms of deploying MediaFLO everywhere in the country, and they will have to go fight with the FCC. They may have to wait as long as possibly 2009 for nationwide spectrum."

Nokia said its Pittsburgh trial would soon expand beyond technological auditions into testing mobile video consumer experience and acceptance. To the world's largest handset-maker, mobile video looks like a sure thing.

"You already have voice, messaging, music, and the one big application missing is TV," said Kari Lehtinen, director of rich media at Nokia. "Mobile phone TV is going to be a huge application from both the mobile phone perspective and the TV perspective. DVB-H provides nice features for this kind of application."

With Qualcomm, TI and Nokia still years away from market, for now the de facto standard bearer for U.S. mobile video services remains MobiTV.

"A year ago, there was a lot of uncertainty and hesitation - many carriers and content providers regarded this opportunity with some dubious, sideways looks," said Phillip Alvelda, MobiTV's chairman and CEO. "But we had our projections, our case studies and our focus groups, and we were very successful in assembling a core set of partnerships that were the forward-lookers willing to experiment and learn. We have effectively become the market leader in a new space that didn't exist before we came along."

Securing space on Sprint PCS's network was most critical to the nascent MobiTV's future.

"We feel like we've got something that appeals to the entire base of subscribers," said Dale Knoop, product manager for Sprint PCS Vision Multimedia Services. "[MobiTV] is about being there to provide people with information they want to know in a way that's not reading. We're also giving them content when they have a moment to kill. It's about staying informed on the go - whether you're male or female, old or young, you need to stay informed, and you're going to have those moments where your mobile phone is the only thing you've got."

Therein lies the key to mobile video use: The handset is not a substitute for the traditional television experience but an intriguing alternative when TV is not available.

"You're never going to see the two overlapping," Knoop said. "If I'm at home, I'm not watching my phone - I'm watching television or using my PC. But I can get weather reports or news updates a lot faster on my phone than I can trying to get my daughter off watching 'Barney.'"

The ultimate success of mobile video will hinge on offering subscribers new experiences that traditional broadcast media cannot, like interactivity.

"We have begun to make certain we have the hooks in place to support really incredible interactivity," Lorbeck said. "For example, imagine watching a music video. The subscriber says, 'I would love to download that ringtone' and hits a soft key to access content related to that artist. Or maybe there's a cooking channel, and when you hit a soft key, a recipe is sent to an e-mail account. Or financial alerts: Qualcomm shareholders can be alerted when Qualcomm is mentioned on a financial channel, with a soft key to launch you into your broker's Web site, where you can perform buy or sell transactions. It's not just passive viewing - that handset is a node on the Internet, and by utilizing the 3G network, the user has connectivity to different Web sites enabling e-commerce and m-commerce applications. Every day, there's some new interactive concept we're coming up with."

And for anyone still doubting the commercial viability of mobile TV at its most basic level, look no farther than the next La-Z-Boy. America is a nation of couch potatoes, and if anyone can intuitively grasp the intrinsic value of making television mobile, it's this country.

"If one stands back and considers media consumption more broadly, in the U.S. television sets are on an average of 4.5 hours a day," Lorbeck said. "This is a behavior we don't have to teach."

COPYRIGHT 2005 PRIMEDIA Business Magazines & Media Inc. All rights reserved.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group

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