US Mobile DTV standard finally approved
By Nilay Patel 
posted Oct 16th 2009 6:33PM
posted Oct 16th 2009 6:33PM
Well freaking finally. The Advanced Television System Committee just approved the Mobile DTV standard, meaning we're finally about to see for-real mobile television in the US. LG and Samsung have already made gear for the new standard, and the tech will be demoed later today before a rollout... sometime. Still, it's heartening news to hear that it's finally ready -- over 800 stations are signed up to broadcast the new signal, which makes use of existing 6MHz airwaves to do everything from straight TV to video-on-demand and targeted advertising. Cool, so now we're what, just a billion years behind DVB adoption?
wtf does that mean? (translation?)
That you would be able to tune in TV on your phone or device just as you do on your TV. Like the Japanese do.
Mobile DTV (Digital TV)
The current network of broadcast transmission towers that carry TV signals to your home will be retrofitted to also deliver a Mobile DTV signal. That signal has the ability to deliver local, full-motion digital broadcasts on multiple mobile devices, without the need for additional broadcast spectrum.
The Mobile DTV platform enables local TV stations to deliver live, digital content to ATSC-capable mobile and video devices such as mobile phones, portable media players, laptop computers, personal navigation devices and automobile-based “infotainment systems.” The service is “in-band”, meaning local broadcasters are providing mobile TV services as part of their terrestrial transmission within the same, existing 6 MHz channel they use for their current ATSC DTV programming.
With little cost, broadcasters can install a Mobile DTV exciter and signal encoding equipment on existing TV transmission systems and gain the ability to transmit a robust, digital mobile TV signal. Consumers will receive that signal on various Mobile DTV devices. The Mobile DTV system allows the splitting of the 19.4 Mb/s of capacity into a slice for delivery to current DTV receivers and a slice for Mobile DTV technology that can be received on new Mobile DTV-capable receivers.
http://www.openmobilevideo.com/about-mobile-dtv/mobile-dtv-101/
And it won't be crappy quality.
- Video quality - Delivering one or more compelling, high-quality mobile/handheld video programs that provide excellent viewing experiences using H.264 base profile video encoding now, and even better resolution (up to 480p) in the future.
- Mobile reception - Clear, consistent reception tested at speeds greater than 100 miles per hour. The system processes the mobile program stream(s) with additional forward error correction and data redundancy to help ensure successful reception.
We could safely say, something like Sprint TV HD.
My question: free?
Or....Bittorrent
call me when you can stream from a torrent on a smartphone
QUESTION: Is this the same standard japan uses? So could I buy the tv tuner for PSP and use that here?
yee haa
I love how we Americans went from being at the forefront of technology (e.g. inventing packet switching, without which we wouldn't have the Internet) to being so god damn far behind everyone. In Europe and Asia they have phones with front-facing cameras so you can videochat! Yes, videochat!
And yet here in good ol' America, we've just gotten mobile DTV.
I think that it is due to a political system that now likes to test how things go around in other places before implementing them at home.
I honestly think the video chat is a novelty that gets old after a few uses. Aside from being able to take better self-portrait pictures, I think I prefer to talk and multi-task that to hold a phone in front of me to video-chat.
I think that's just true only in the cell phone market and because the govt left the mobile carriers alone to do what they wanted. Normally that would produce better results (competition) but in this case it worked against us. The US is so freakin' big and the mobile carriers were so fragmented and spread out all over the country that in effect there was little incentive to innovate or lower service costs. In fact, we in the US pay one the highest service costs in the world to use mobile phones. And yeah, US consumers are also guilty of not demanding better phones.
Thankfully the iPhone is reversing that trend plus the other smart phones (Pre, Android) are leading America's come back as the forefront innovators in mobile phones. Oh and of course, Canadians with their Blackberries!
I phone inovation? lmao T-mobile is turning the industry around with android and reasonable priced plans. Also 21 Mbps is gonna leave the other carriers in the dust.
So, why can't these mobile devices just receive the normal non-mobile DTV broadcast? Why the need for a separate standard?
That would be too easy.
I think it has to do with the reception of the devices. Maybe it is more efficient to have this signal sent to the mobile devices that the standard one. For example, so for it is presumed that in the future 480p would the able to be broadcast, where some stations are able to alreayd broadcast 1080p to TVs.
Power usage.
Because 8vsb modulation is notoriously bad when the antenna isn't stationary.
The bad news here is that the bandwidth for these sub channels is coming out of the same 19.3 Mbps allotted for HDTV. So if you thought your local HD quality sucked now, just wait.
@Ben
Thank you. I always wondered why they didn't just come out with a mobile ATSC tuner chip that just rescales the standard broadcasts in hardware.
...Sean.
Yes! :)
DVB-T/ H in europe sucks monkey balls.
dont see any OTA HD channels here either...
Mobile TV is really cool. :P Too bad nobody watches it in the countries that do have it. Soon we'll get to ignore it just like the rest of the world Yay!
You're right. As much as cellphone video calls. Maybe if you are stuck in the train and your favorite soap opera is about to start, then it could be cool :D
It might be good for places like hiking or camping where you want to watch the last 5 minutes of your college team but you are nowhere near an electrical outlet to plug your netbook or tv....
@xconan - shouldn't hiking and camping put you out of the coverage area?
Wonder how much Verizon will charge for it?
It's free-to-air, just like regular TV.
I am thinking more on the grounds of Comcast or Time Warner
@John Stracke: while DTV is free, it will compete with Vcast.... I'm sure verizon wont charge for it, they never charged you for wifi on your phone...i mean, they have been so generous with wi-fi on every phone (i think verizon will get special phones with it, like it has without wifi for so long).. It wasn't till apple required a data plan for iphone, so verizon could too require it... that's what I think made verizon allow wifi on their phones. If VZW can charge you for it, their marketing will tell you it's an awesome feature... if they can't figure a way to charge you... then you aint getting none.
Joy. Even less bandwidth for the main HD channel. I'm probably the only person on the planet that thinks this is the dumbest thing we've ever done, but I do. ATSC users, your picture just got that much worse. Wait a couple more years and it will be as bad as cable.
I have the same fears, my only hope is that instead of broadcast another simulcast of the main feed, broadcasters will replace the current simulcast with this one, which should use less bandwidth then current multicast channels since it uses h.264. Yes, I'm an eternal optimist.
How many years until Apple finally builds functionality into the iphone to take advantage of this? I mean ipods JUST got fm radio.
hopefully in the next couple years. But then, look at WinMo, even after 10 years, it still has the worst mobile web browser in the world.
Ah but thats the beauty of windows mobile. The default browser might suck but you have so many alternatives including skyfire which pretty much beats all the others in features, maybe not interface thou. It gives you choices not restrictions.
I'm buying stock in comcsast.
This will only make sense in really high population density areas - and even then its debatable. Most carriers don't make any rel cash off of the IP based video services they have now. And the stupid bastards sure as hell don't let the technology / service providers make any cash off of it - fuck the carriers are dumb.
I know something about this from first hand experience: I managed the rollout of a nationwide 'mobile TV' service here in Canada. We created the platform that it ran on and we hosted everything. The carrier made money every month (was there best selling service in that category according to them), we lost money every month (they would only give us a crumb from every meal), while the content provider (a national media company) maybe broke even. After a year we tried to re-negotiate, saying 'we'll expand support to a much greater number of devices and bare the cost of doing so, thus more than doubling your subscriber base - but we want 30%'. The carrier balked - so we shut the thing down. So instead of making MORE money the carrier pulled the plug on principle. The principle being that they always get more than 70%. Stupid fuckers.
Anyways: in theory this may be free (the signals) but the carriers will probably disable it unless you pay. I know our cartel-like carriers in Canada will anyways.
thats what the xda forums are for
and it will also be illegal to own a receiver in Canada that receives US content.
It's good to notice that while the "two million dollar laptop" story is always amusing, it's not very original. The author probably read it, like me, on the book Digital Life, by Nicholas Negroponte (back from when his was still heading the Media Lab on MIT, much before the OLPC project). It would be nice for the author to point that out instead of claiming the tale as his own.
Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh great, now we have another proprietary US standard that by the time it launches will be SUPER antiquated (as opposed to just antiquated/useless, which it is now). Aren't these people learning anything from MediaFLO and Mobile TV in Europe? This isn't something people really want.
hey - if kiss me through the phone hits the charts in the top ten - it's something people want right now - and those are kids that have no other means of 'private' communication.
family computer is monitored
texting is better than talking
can't have a computer in your own room because it's the devil
can't have a facebook/myspace/twitter/yahoo account
Mobile IPTV is kicking off in the UK, much to the network operators data dismay.
iphone.tvcatchup.com - Example here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc3wvv5POxI