Multi standard tuners kill FUD factor in DTV wars
THERE IS a global game of risk being played on Latin America. The recent availability of multi-standard mobile TV decoding chips and the involvement by the Brazilian government means there's still hope for the Japanese ISDB-T camp.
Brazilian embassies take a role
Three forces, the Europeans with DVB, the USA with ATSC, and the unusual
Brazilian-Japanese axis battle to conquer each country. Chile postponed its
decision until the end of March, and Argentina also followed with the
uncertainty. In the last few months, this scribbler wondered why didn't the
Brazil government push for its "ISDB-T international" on a regional scale along
with the Japanese. Now, the Brazilian government has joined the ISDB-T
promotional effort. This is specially important for Brazil as the country plans
to manufacture ISDB-T set-top boxes locally instead of importing those from
Japan.
At a recent event at the Ricardo Palma university in Lima, Peru, a promotional event was held by the ISDB-T camp and for the first time there was the Brazilian embassy in addition to usual attendance from the Japanese, reports Peruvian site Universia. The Brazilian embassy joined the usual Japanese attendance including its Communications ministry and the Digital Broascasting Experts Group (DIBEG). Also present were Peruvian government officials and several speakers including representatives from NEC, Tokyo Broadcasting System television, etc. Among the demostrations which were offered a whole day were fixed and mobile receivers, mobile phones with 1-seg reception,data broadcast, and HDTV modes. After field testing the three competing standards, a report by a group of technicians from Peru's UPC unieversity was handed over to the government on Tuesday so the final decision now rests on the hands of the government to award one with its winning medal.
New multi-standard tuner chips for mobile phones kill FUD
There's plenty of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) in the public and private
debates about the three main competing digital TV standards. One argument I read
over and over was that the Japanese ISDB-T, despite having plenty of technical
merits was at odds with the mobile/cellular phone standards more pervasive
throughout the region, that is, the European GSM. In that sense, advocates of
the European DVB standard often mentioned that getting GSM phones with digital
TV tuners for the Japanese standard would be expensive or raise of cost for
consumers in the region.
In a document presented to the Chilean Subtel regulatory agency by telephony behemoth Telefonica, one can read, for instance: "ISDB-T is not compatible with GSM because in Japan there is no GSM". The good news is that technology has destroyed this argument. First it was Blighty-based fabless start-up Mirics Semiconductor, which launched what it claimed to be the "world's first polyband tuner" chip, "dubbed SiGe biCMOS"and sporting compatibility with DVB-H, T-DMB, ISDB-T, DAB-IP, MediaFlo, DAB, AM/FM, and the Chinese DMB-T/H.
Then came Samsung, which announced its first phone for the Brazilian market sporting GSM compatibility and an integrated ISDB-T receiver. After that, NeoMagic's "MiMagic 6" processor was released which works with all competing digital TV standards. Then it was Israel based fabless semiconductor maker Siano which r eleased its SMS8022 a receiver chip which covers the whole UHF spectrum -470 to 870 MHz- and supports not only the three competing standards mentioned above but also MediaFLO.
Other companies are surely working on or have developed multi-standard receiver chips. It only makes sense to do it that way. And this means that the "FUD" argument is blown out of the water. Mobile phone manufacturers are and will be able to create devices that can tune on any of the many available mobile TV standards. For road warriors moving from airport to airport, this will be a killer feature.
Conclusion
Latin America as a whole represents a combined market of 400M viewers, and as of
this writing, each camp has scored one win, with Mexico selecting the American
ATSC standard for obvious proximity and geopolitical reasons, Brazil selecting
-and enhancing- the Japanese ISDB-T to boost local electronics manufacturing,
and Uruguay selected DVB apparently to be the first on the block to do it. The
race has just begun and by the end of March we will supposedly begin to see
leaders and in this interesting horse race.
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I like like ISDB over the other DTV trasmission methods. And I think that it was pretty clever that MPEG4 was made part of the Brazilian standard. It just makes sense. I wish good luck to Japan is hitting ISDB throughout LA and elsewhere. It's about time that the best technology with the sensible costs wins.