Industry forum calls for broadcasters, operators to come together

The U.S. may have a head start in the global mobile TV race. Although the technology has been slow to take off, AT&T and Verizon have launched services, and more are in the works. Meanwhile, a significant number of countries are lagging behind the most advanced nations in even defining their regulatory framework for mobile TV, according to a survey of 23 countries published this month by the Broadcast Mobile Convergence Forum. While there is potential for mobile TV — bmcoforum estimates a $20 billion market by 2011 — Dr. Claus Sattler, executive director of the forum, said most countries are leaving it up to the operators to find their own frequencies and overcome mobile TV's regulatory hurtles.

“We only have a few countries where the regulatory framework is well-established and only a few countries where we have licenses,” Sattler said. “We would like to draw attention to this for the commission in Europe and the regulators to say, ‘Come up; start to do your own work because you can miss the market.’”

The outlier in the study was Italy, which already has more than 1 million users with mobile TV-capable handsets. Other countries, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, have completed their license granting and either have started or are about to launch mobile broadcast TV services this year. Belgium, Greece, Portugal and Spain, as well as the majority of northern and eastern European countries, have yet to decide on licensing conditions and processes. The process of acquiring licenses, consulting the public and changing the laws to allow the service often can take years, and bmcoforum believes the market won't wait. The organization's 110 members from all parts of the value chain are calling for the countries to speed up the decision process and take advantage of the opportunities inherent in terrestrial mobile broadcast TV.

“We are faced here with the convergence aspect of bringing the industry together — the broadcast industry and the mobile industry. … It is a chicken-and-egg problem,” Sattler said. “Broadcasters wait for mobile operators to sell the service, and operators wait for the content to come up. They have a difficult contractual situation. Many broadcasters and many mobile operators should agree to set up an overall service. … The regulators also have to think how with the tender they can really enable a fast service kickoff.”