MANHASSET, N.Y. — What would happen if a specification designed to unify an emerging market became obsolete just as the market jelled?
For DVB-H, rushed into development in 2004 to accommodate the low-power requirements of mobile television, the question may not be hypothetical.
While the mobile-TV market in the West has developed at a snail's pace, semiconductor process technology has advanced so rapidly that DVB-T, a terrestrial DTV standard that had been thought too power-hungry for mobile TV, can now easily deliver TV broadcast to battery-operated portable devices. In the view of some, that may negate the need for DVB-H.
The prospect that DVB-T may eclipse the handheld-specific variant for bringing mobile TV to portable devices--though not quite yet to cell phones--has some DVB-H chip vendors repurposing their products and shifting their targets for end-system and geographical markets.
A case in point is Freescale Semiconductor Inc., which had thrown its weight behind DVB-H but now is pitching a low-power DVB-T tuner for portable media players. DVB-T power consumption has dropped to the point where users can safely watch extended TV programs on a portable player supporting the older format, said Berardino Baratta, general manager of Freescale's multimedia applications division.
Likewise, DiBcom, a leading DVB-H demodulation chip maker, has cultivated a volume market, but not for DVB-H on cell phones. Rather, the company has built a business in DVB-T and DVB-T/DVB-H combo solutions for automotive and notebook PCs. DiBcom CEO Yannick Levy said the industry has sold 4 million DVB-T receiver dongles over the past two years in Europe alone, and DiBcom claims to have made the bulk of those sales.
Vendors are also shifting geographical focus for their mobile-TV products.
Analog Devices Inc., which has yet to achieve a sizable DVB-H deployment globally, is leveraging a demodulator developed for DVB-H to target China's GB-2006 terrestrial DTV standard (formerly called DMB-T/H) .
South Korea, Japan and China are "the three largest mobile-TV markets today," said David Robertson, product line director for ADI's high-speed converter group. The company is focusing on China and has opened a joint lab with Legend Silicon for developing GB-2006 mobile solutions, Robertson said.
Microtune Inc. Is also pursuing a multistandard strategy for mobile TV, focusing on DVB-H and South Korea's T-DMB standard. It has scored a design win for a DVB-H tuner in LG handsets sold in Italy, and it considers China's mobile-TV market "a hot area," said Phil Spruce, mobile-TV product-marketing manager. But Spruce added that the final verdict on China's mobile-TV standard is "still not concrete."
