Mobile TV Dominates at 3GSM World Congress

16 February 2006

With the event organisers reporting that more than 50,000 people visited the biggest ever 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona this week, there’s no doubt as to what the main topic of discussion was on the exhibition floor: Mobile TV – in all its many possible forms. For DVB the good news is that DVB-H was clearly most widely demonstrated technology, a further reflection of the likelihood that DVB-H will ultimately become the most widely deployed mobile TV standard.

The DVB Project Office compiled a Guide to DVB-H @ 3GSM World Congress which listed forty companies that were demonstrating DVB-H products or services. Visitors to the show will have seen that even this was a conservative estimate of the number of companies that are now working in this space. Just about all of the major handset vendors were showing advanced prototype DVB-H receivers, with some expected to be deployed in commercial launches as soon as September in Italy. There were silicon solutions on show from a wide range of vendors with many demonstrating the reception of DVB-H on devices other than cellphones, such as PDAs and laptop PCs.

The Catalan Pavilion was the location for a DVB-H Update on February 15th. Speakers, (from left in photograph below), included Antonio Fernández-Paniagua, Deputy Director Radio Spectrum Planning and Management at the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade; Carles Solà i Ferrando, Minister of Universities, Research and Information Society for the Catalonian government; Tobías Martínez, Managing Director of Abertis Telecom; and Peter MacAvock, Executive Director of the DVB Project, who gave an overview of some of the key results from the Oxford and Helsinki trials and emphasised the strong multi-vendor support for DVB-H at 3GSM. He also stressed the fact that DVB-H offers excellent opportunities for synergies between the worlds of broadcast and telecommunications.
There were three DVB-H mulitiplexes on air in Barcelona, carrying more than 40 channels. It was not uncommon to see groups of people gathered around DVB-H receivers showing live coverage of the Winter Olympic Games from Turin. Also of significance were the first implementations of the DVB IPDC specification for the Electronic Service Guide (ESG).

Samsung LG

BenQ – Siemens

Nokia

Motorola

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