Mobile TV chipmaker Telegent Systems today unveiled the TLG1120, a single-chip CMOS mobile TV receiver supporting all major worldwide broadcast TV standards, including NTSC, PAL, and SECAM TV broadcasts. According to the three-year old startup, the TLG1120 is the first mobile TV receiver to provide global access to free-to-air content.

The announcement follows news that after only nine months of volume production shipments, Telegent has shipped more than five million units of its free-to-air mobile TV receiver, the TLG1100. At the end of last year, the TLG1100 was embedded in 40 models of handsets, available to consumers throughout Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Now, with the Olympics coming up this year in China, the company is kicking up production and shipping in higher volumes to prepare for worldwide mobile TV coverage of the summer games.

Weijie Yun, president & CEO of Telegent, said that the success of the solution is based on the ability of consumers to watch the same live, familiar programming on their handset that they view and enjoy in their home, an opinion most in the industry have echoed.

Taking video mobile was a big topic at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, where Telegent displayed its technology, however, the consensus was generally that that the mobile TV experience is not yet compelling enough for the industry to really gain momentum. Sam Sheng, chief technology officer at Telegent, said that in the US at least, this has been a result of cellular operators’ reluctance to open their networks.

“The US operators are phenomenally slow to move, but there is definitely interest,” Sheng said. “I think the obvious answer is the walled-garden problem. The real impact of the iPhone is that the walled garden is falling. Up until this point, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint have been phenomenally protective of their networks.”

As operators, most notable, Verizon Wireless have vowed to open their networks, this model could be changing, albeit slowly. According to Charles Hall, senior analyst for Rider Research, live TV broadcast to mobile TV devices is going to be a reality in the US in the next six to 18 months, pending on approval from the Federal Communications Commission. In China, live mobile screens have been promised by the summer Olympics, and the US should not be far from following its lead.

“Currently in this country, the mobile phone companies control what you can get on your cell phones,” Hall said. “It appears that logjam is breaking…This idea of opening the mobile phone networks is definitely percolating through the pot now. If Sprint can pull off its WiMax venture, Xohm, it is going to put a lot of pressure on other companies to at least approach that kind of openness so you can view anything you want to on your phone, which you cannot do now.”

On a global basis, the reason operators are interested, Sheng said, is that ultimately mobile TV becomes a platform from which they can offer value-added services by coupling their network services with TV. These incremental revenue streams can come from premium content, targeted advertising, increased SMS traffic and data exchange. Unlike with next-generation paid content mobile TV standards, it can be done now and with little upset to the company.

“The real problem with technologies like MPH and AVS-B is that it requires the broadcasters to roll out new infrastructure and potentially cannibalize some of their existing infrastructure or bandwidth,” Sheng said. “So there is a push back happening on the US MPH, AVS-B proposals…The broadcasters are sort of in a Catch 22. The cellular operators aren’t really going to sign up through someone else’s paid services, but at the same time they’d really like this thing deployed. They’ve got a business model problem there.”

The Open Mobile Alliance introduced AVS-B, or Advanced-Vestigial SideBand, at CES this year. Invented by Samsung, the standard uses the broadcaster’s existing digital TV transmission system, rather than the carrier’s spectrum. Both Hall and Sheng agreed that standards like AVS-B and DVB-H can be every expensive and take years to build the infrastructure for. Given that five billion people on the planet out of six billion don’t even have access to digital TV in any way shape or form, Sheng said that analog signals like NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, are compelling for emerging markets where these are the only standards available for mobile TV deployment.

Going forward in the North American market, Telegent’s free-to-air technology can be used in conjunction with other next-generation standards, including Qualcomm’s MediaFlo and DVB-H, allowing consumers to choose whether they access free local content, pay for video clips and recorded content or do some combination there-in.

“It is potentially such a big market and it is just emerging, so no one really knows what is going to happen,” Hall said. “But if you can get local TV shows on your mobile phone for free, would you watch them? Yes. The question is how you go about doing that.”