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Crown Castle leases Modeo's airwaves
With AT&T and Verizon both selecting MediaFLO for their mobile TV needs, T-Mobile unable to make up its mind, and Sprint backing off, hopes seem to be fading that DVB-H-based Modeo will secure a deal with one of the national carriers here -- and accordingly, parent Crown Castle is looking to stem its losses. The company has announced that it has leased Modeo's bandwidth -- you know, the stuff it needs to actually offer a mobile TV service -- to two venture capital firms for $13 million a year, with an option to renew the lease for another 10 years or acquire the spectrum outright in 2013. How the firms intend to use their new found airwaves remains unknown, but unless Hiwire stays in this thing, there's a very real possibility that Qualcomm's going to be running unopposed in the mobile entertainment race this side of the pond.
Modeo smartphone unboxed
It's amazing how short a distance we've travelled since we first spotted Modeo's DVB-H smartphone in April. Sure, now we know that it's just an HTC Foreseer under those orange accents, but after months of promises, the phone is only just now making it into our hands in boxed form. There's live DVB-H service lighting up NYC, but only six channels to watch, and no sign of a commercial launch in sight, as we mentioned yesterday. Luckily, the phone feels good in the hand, and while it might be bit large for an EDGE device in this day and age, it still looks and feels proportional in hand. The screen is quite sharp and general performance is snappy, especially video, thanks to the NVIDIA GoForce 5500 GPU under the hood. TV performance is great, at least as far as we've tested it in Manhattan and Brooklyn -- we'll revisit this in a week or so and let you know how we're doing -- but CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Sports, Discovery Channel and E! get old fast, and the eight audio channels are about as basic as it gets. We'll give you our full impressions once we've had some more time to soak it all in, but for now you can peep the unboxing gallery below, along with our hands-on pics from last night's event.%Gallery-1848%
Modeo boosts signal power, shows off DVB-H SD and mini-PCI cards
Modeo hosted a little shindig tonight to unveil some of its future DVB-H plans and show off some kit. The big news is that the FCC has approved Modeo's request to boost signal power by 10 times in urban markets and 20 times in rural areas, giving the company a much easier path to coverage rollout and better signal quality. Modeo also mentioned that while it's currently testing service in NYC only, it has designs already in place for moving into the top 30 markets in the US. We also got our hands on upcoming DVB-H SD and mini-PCI cards, with the SD cards up and running in a myriad of Pocket PC devices, and the mini-PCI card running smooth -- though rather pixelated -- video on a Dell laptop. The next move for Modeo is to get channel changing time under 2 seconds, continue to improve video quality, add PVR and mediacasting capabilities, and stick interactivity into the programming. Modeo's software partner Penthera already had most of those capabilities up and running on demo units, as you can see in the gallery below, so it looks like most of this stuff will be all ready by the time a commercial launch happens. When that might be is anyone's guess. Modeo is still looking for a retail partner, and they made it pretty clear that Qualcomm's MediaFLO model of hitching onto mobile providers is exactly what Modeo would like to be doing -- unfortunately for Modeo, nobody's signed up yet.%Gallery-1845%
Modeo launches mobile TV beta service in NYC
After a delay and a promise, Modeo has finally come through with the planned beta launch of its DVB-H mobile TV service in New York City, with the company also showing off the technology to those in attendance at CES. As we knew before, the NYC trial will be limited to just a few hundred users during its beta stage, each of who will get to test out the service with a shiny new HTC Foreseer handset. In addition performing the usual smartphoning duties, it'll let the lucky beta testers pick up mobile TV from the likes of Fox News and the Discovery Channel, as well as streaming audio courtesy of Music Choice. What's not so clear are any firm details on Modeo's plans beyond the NYC trial, with the company only saying that the beta will continue throughout the first quarter of 2007 and that they plan to use feedback from it to "evaluate network distribution options with wireless carriers." In other words, convince 'em to sign up before they go somewhere else.
Modeo announcing NYC trial next week
See, that wasn't so bad, now was it? We're guessing a few DVB-H fanboys and girls this side of the Atlantic were miffed at the news Modeo had slipped the go-live date for their trial (or "commercial beta," as they're calling it) in New York City -- but just two short weeks later, everything's ready to rock. A few hundred lucky participants will get hooked up with HTC Foreseers to experience music and video services powered by Modeo's DVB-H network, which GigaOM reports will be officially blessed next week at CES. Without any carriers yet signed to their platform, the folks at Modeo have got to be sweating bullets at this point, especially in light of the fact that Verizon and Sprint have both hopped aboard the MediaFLO bandwagon. Cingular and T-Mobile have yet to finalize their plans for mobile TV, but we'd imagine they'll be keeping a keen eye on Gotham for the next few months.
Modeo slips date for New York trial
The wait for DVB-H-based mobile TV this side of the pond may have just gotten a little longer. A management shakeup at Modeo -- patron saint (along with Hiwire) of American DVB-H -- has hit the company as their search for a carrier partner continues, and its commercial-grade service trial in New York City using HTC's Foreseer appears to be a casualty. Originally scheduled for a Q4 2006 launch, the trial will now begin (knock on wood) in early '07. Between Hiwire and various MediaFLO-based efforts coming down the pike, Modeo's drama may not ultimately mean much to mobile TV's outlook in these parts, but it'd be tragic nonetheless to see one of these guys bite the dust before they even get out of the gate, would it not?[Via Phone Scoop]
ComVu enables live video broadcasts from phones
If citizen journalists have been waiting on live broadcasts from 3G Windows Mobile phones to DVB-H receivers to begin their revolution of fair, balanced, and cute-cat-centric news, the time has come. ComVu, in conjunction with Modeo, has just announced their PocketCaster software for Windows Mobile 5.0 that uses Windows Media codecs to transmit live video to DVB-H users. Modeo hopes to provide those users, with their DVB-H smartphone and networks already in the works. Details are sparse, but we're guessing that video will have to make a stop at a central location before it gets sent out over the DVB-H infrastructure, so there's always the chance that someone might try to cut out the thirty minutes of feline napping in our latest documentary epic -- but we can feel the tides of power shifting.[Via The Web To Go]
Hiwire to compete with MediaFlo, Modeo's DVB-H
Another major player has joined Qualcomm and Crown Castle with plans to enter a nascent mobile TV market whose future is wildly uncertain. Aloha Partners L.P. will ultimately spend $500 million to roll out its Hiwire service nationwide on the 700MHz spectrum, which it will share with Qualcomm's MediaFlo, and which is considered superior to the 1600MHz spectrum owned by Crown subsidiary Modeo. However, Hiwire will join Modeo in adopting the DVB-H standard for mobile TV, as opposed to the proprietary MediaFlo technology that will be embedded into CDMA handsets. With Verizon already committed to offering the Qualcomm tech to its customers, Hiwire will need to partner with either Cingular or T-Mobile if it expects to gain a similar foothold in the GSM market, and even then, its success will largely be based on consumers' willingness to adopt a service that so far they have shown little interest in.[Via MobileTracker]
Modeo's DVB-H smartphone
Not sure when, or even if, this phone is ever going to be released (at least in its current form), but Microsoft is showing off a Windows Mobile-powered Smartphone from Modeo at its booth here at CTIA that comes with a DVB-H receiver for watching mobile digital video broadcasts. The phone itself is par for the course for a Windows Mobile Smartphone (the phone is actually made by HTC) -- it has quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, a 2.2-inch, QVGA display, Bluetooth 1.2, a 200MHz OMAP processor, 128MB of Flash ROM, 64MB of RAM, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, and a microSD memory card slot. With this thing it's really all about the DVB-H tuner, and the demo Ryan and I saw of QVGA resolution, 30 fps video was pretty tight. The whole point of DVB-H (and DMB and MediaFLO) is that you can watch digital TV on your phone or handheld without any of the stuttering, caching, or picture quality issues that are largely unavoidable when you stream over a wireless data connection. Modeo is already testing its DVB-H network here in the States, but have not yet said when they'll be launching commercially (getting the carriers to agree to sell phones with DVB-H tuners is a ridiculous complicated affair). Click on for a few more pics.
