Verizon Wireless, ESPN, CBS, Fox

These giants have all teamed up to provide college football bowl games in full-length broadcast to mobiles through Verizon’s V CAST Mobile TV. They are covering 24 bowl games this season.

DiBcom, NIF SMBC, NTT Finance

DiBcom, semiconductor producer and a leader in mobile TV solutions, has received investments from two of Japan’s major investors: NIF SMBC Ventures, the largest private equity firm in Japan, and NTT Finance, the number one telecom operator in Japan. Specific terms were not disclosed.

Verizon Wireless Brings College Bowl Games to V CAST Mobile TV

If you’re traveling this holiday season and all you really want for Christmas is to see NCAA college football bowl games, look no further than Verizon Wireless and V CAST Mobile TV.

Folks lucky enough to live in an area where they can get V CAST Mobile TV – and have one of the few compatible handsets – can see full-length coverage of 24 college football bowl games this season, kicking off with ESPN Mobile TV’s telecast of the December 20 Poinsettia Bowl and finishing with ESPN’s GMAC Bowl in January. Bowl game coverage is going to be provided by ESPN Mobile TV, CBS Mobile and Fox Mobile. Since its launch in March, V CAST Mobile TV has aired a variety of live sporting events, totaling hundreds of hours.

Ryan Hughes, VP of digital media programming for Verizon Wireless, noted, “By bringing 24 bowl games to V CAST Mobile TV customers… Verizon Wireless is once again demonstrating our commitment to deliver the best, exclusive programming available on mobile phones.”

Some of this season’s 24 bowl games being offered by Verizon are:

– Poinsettia Bowl: Utah v Navy on December 20 from ESPN Mobile TV

– New Orleans Bowl: Memphis v Florida Atlantic on December 21 from ESPN Mobile TV

– New Mexico Bowl: Nevada v New Mexico on December 22 from ESPN Mobile TV

– Motor City Bowl: Perdue v Central Michigan on December 26 from ESPN Mobile TV

– Alamo Bowl: Penn State v Texas A&M on December 29 from ESPN Mobile TV

– Gator Bowl: Texas Tech. v Virginia on January 1 from CBS Mobile TV

– AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic: Missouri v Arkansas on January 1 from Fox Mobile

Note that, like all sporting events on TV, programming is subject to change and to blackouts.

QuickPlay Media Enhancing the Mobile Viewing Experience

QuickPlay Media, a big player in the mobile TV and video viewing market, has released the newest set of features for its OpenVideo 4.0. The new features are geared towards allowing mobile service providers the ability to offer full length TV and videos with customizable options. The first implementation of these features will occur in the first quarter of 2008.

The feature that looks the most useful is a resume-playback function. This will allow users to pick up where they left off in a program, whether they were not able to finish the show in one sitting or if there was a network interruption. Advertisers can also enjoy this new feature, because it allows them to insert targeted advertising at the time of playback.

Another nice improvement is the ability for users to search for content within the video clip or TV program. Content providers and mobile operators are also able to place chapters in content, making their larger files take up less bandwidth and be easier to manage.

“Working closely with leading mobile operators, we have seen how the evolution of the mobile device and the network has created a surge in demand for full-length TV and movie content from consumers,” said Wayne Purboo, CEO and co-founder of QuickPlay Media. “We are very excited to support this growing demand with a high-quality solution tailored to fit the unique requirements of a [mobile] customer.”

Nintendo’s Mobile TV a Shocking Success

– Makes It a 50m Device Powerbroker
– Mobile TV Adaptor Sells Out in a Few Hours
– Millions of Japanese Are Waiting for Non-handsets with TV
– Sony Follows
– Will Apple Feel Compelled to Add TV to the iPod?

This report originally appeared in Faultline. For the complete copy, please e-mail paperboy@riderresearch.com.

When Faultline’s mobile TV report, published in April, suggested that as many as 143 million devices would be able to pick up mobile TV by the end of 2011, without actually being cell phones, it caught a few people by surprise and there was a little skepticism. But this week, with the arrival of the all too obvious TV adapter for the Nintendo DS, what we said would be “madness” if it did not happen, has finally come to pass – a well-established handheld device is getting TV.

And it only requires one device to go down this route, and many, if not all, similar devices will be forced to follow. Stocks for the TV adaptor sold out in Japan in just seven days, and it would have been sooner, if demand had not been so high that the Nintendo Web site crashed within two hours of the device being available. It wouldn’t be so bad if Nintendo had mounted a huge advertising campaign, but instead it had merely put a button on its Web site saying the adaptor is now available, and demand ramped from there.

The key to the huge success, in Japan at least, is the fact that the ISDB-T services are free to air. ISDB-T mobile TV is also known as 1-seg, due to the fact that the mobile TV signal is a single segment of an OFDM signal, squeezed in with 12 other segments, used for terrestrial TV, in a 13 slice terrestrial TV broadcasting system, each having 429 KHz of spectrum across a 6 MHz piece of spectrum.

The fact that this service is free-to-air, means that everyone that has a handset which can view the TV channels, uses it to some extent. The worry among many cellular operators in Western Europe and the US is that people will not pay to receive TV services, which has created reluctance to speed to market with pay TV equivalents.

So far around 12 million devices have been reported shipped in Japan, but back in July when the last figures were out, they were shipping at 1.3 million a month on average and rising, which means that at least 18 million devices have now shipped, and it may pass 20 million by Christmas.

That has had the effect of driving volume pricing down on radios, tuner chips and antenna, so that it costs virtually nothing (under $10) to add the TV capabilities to devices, which already have a screen and an applications processor.

Already companies like Toshiba, Fujitsu and Sony make their own ISDB-T tuner chips for incorporation into their own and other manufacturer’s PCs, while Sony has also announced an ISDB-T plug in for the recently delivered second generation PlayStation Portable (PSP 2000). As far as we can see the new PSP, which was announced back in July, has been delivered having been promised in September, and delivered late, but we can’t find record of the ISDB-T capability, launched at the same time as the PSP 2000, actually being delivered yet.

Unlike the Nintendo DS though, the Sony tuner will not have the same demand as the Nintendo DS, because Sony is using the device as a ruse to ship more PSPs, and has limited the device only to new PSPs, so there is no great installed base to dip into.

But at present PC add-on ISDB-T cards have all come out in Japan at around $95 because they use a form of encryption, as the TV programs write to storage, limiting playback to the PC that downloaded it. The new Nintendo DS tuner costs around $60, the same price as the Sony PSP device.

We assume that this means that the Nintendo cannot store the TV for later viewing, and so is in essence a simpler chip. In fact it sounds very similar to the PSP version, which does not store video at all and does not show an EPG, but never the less it is a miniature TV for $60.

A magazine survey in Japan indicated that around 18% of DS owners already want to go ahead and buy the TV adaptor for their DS, and given that there are over 20 million owners in Japan, that implies 3.6 million DS owners alone will eventually swell the ranks of the 1-seg mobile TV customers there. But remember, this is without seeing the product advertised or demonstrated in any way – just promoted through world of mouth and a Web site.

Admittedly the PC cards which have shipped so far are already included in the shipment numbers revealed by the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association, but the games will rapidly drive 1-seg numbers up above 24 million, in a population of 127 million and in handset terms, by year end that’s 20 million out of a population of 95 million handsets in Japan – over 20%.

All the previous estimates in any territory of the take up of mobile TV have put 20% as their “dream” figure and based calculations on more prosaic numbers like 3% year-one penetration up to 7.5% or so.

Imagine a global take up of mobile TV in line with Japan’s experience, and suddenly we would be looking at astronomical figures like 600 million devices out of the three billion handsets shipped, and more non-handset devices. Of course that’s not going to happen. Japan is advanced, highly penetrated by mobile handsets, and has a coordinated, regulator led policy on free to air TV. But what it does is paint a picture of just what might happen in a similar territory, take the US, if a free to air quality mobile TV service is offered not by the cellular operators (who might try to keep it for themselves) but by the broadcasting community. A similar 20% handset penetration would represent 54 million mobile TV handsets, plus a fair number of non-handsets, within two years of launch.

The problem with predicting that as being likely is that it requires agreement between cellular operators that they would work with a common TV standard – in the US that would have to be the ATSC M/H standard, which is not complete yet and won’t lead to devices until 2009. If that happens, it will happen without the initial blessing of AT&T Mobility or Verizon Wireless.

But what this sudden DS TV popularity does, is makes Nintendo realize that it is a power broker within mobile TV. If broadcasters cannot get the big two cellular operations to back a new free to air TV service, by subsidizing handsets with the requisite radio and tuners, then at least they can go to Nintendo, which, with some confidence could add the capability for its existing base. Interestingly the existing base are mostly under-18-year-old children, growing into a phase in their life when they will want a TV set separated from parental control, many of them currently without a laptop of their own, with no other source for a portable TV device.

And within that realization, it means that it is imperative that Sony keeps pace, and offers whatever TV options Nintendo offers – in whatever countries, and that puts the question fairly and squarely in Apple’s court regarding the iPod, and the iPhone.

We all know that Apple believes in the walled garden approach, and prefers to have total control over the content that runs on its devices – hence the fact that its DRM FairPlay is not shared with any other company (unless you accept that AT&T shares it somewhat).

Apple is certain to NOT WANT to offer broadcast TV on an iPod, partly because then it cedes control of the content on the device, but also because in the US, there is no possibility at this stage of cutting a deal with the dominant mobile TV purveyor, with any confidence.

The only operation building out is MediaFLO, and while that is currently only working with Verizon Wireless, it should, in the New Year, open up to AT&T Mobility. At that point perhaps AT&T might ask Apple to fit a radio and a tuner to the iPhone or to an iPod or both.

We think Apple would be reluctant to do this, but already it will begin to be marginalized in the Asia Pacific arena if it doesn’t offer mobile TV, with Nintendo taking some of its oxygen in Japan, and surely the next stop for it will be in Korea – itself already with 5.5 million T-DMB handsets and other devices – with 1.1 million SDMB handsets that’s 13% of the population – 17% of the handset owners.

If you add the fact that around the world there are another 30 million Nintendo DS devices, not counting the 20 million in Japan, and 26 million Sony PSPs, then there are enough captive devices in two accounts to harm iPod shipments. Only seven million of the PSP devices are inside Japan, so that’s another 19 million PSPs around the world.

If you look at the types of deals that are happening in mobile TV, there are many instances where the politics are far closer to Japan. In France, the UK, Germany and Italy, and several other countries in Europe, there are clusters of cellular operators backing one DVB-H service, either launched or about to launch. DVB-H is another of the broadcast services that can be added to a portable device for around $10. And these services are unlikely to be constrained by cellular operators that are operating the service within a walled garden. Instead there will be multiple device types made ready, and some, notably those in Russia, and Africa, are expecting the purchase of cheap specialist players to play a big part.

In other parts of Asia Pacific, such as the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, DVB-H is being pushed primarily by broadcasters, and cellular operators are once again clustered around these services – not in control of them, so non-handset players are a certainty.

Now that Nintendo has established that it can bundle a few chips into the DS to ensure and accelerate its success, then each of these markets will soon find that bundled TV functions will be important for any portable player’s continued success. And where Nintendo goes, Sony will follow, and where these two establish a bridgehead, Apple will feel the squeeze and feel compelled to follow.

We would expect Apple to come late to this game, at the end of 2008 and come reluctantly, but if it waits until the US has a clear mobile TV winner, it will be yet another thing undermining its colossal lead in portable devices.

The DS is a touch screen device, launched a full three years before the iPhone, and allows finger touch channel change on the second screen (remember DS means Dual Screen) as well as volume control, instant pause, video annotation, and various Nintendo only video applications merging video with maps, and chat. When the DS launched, everyone said touch screens were dumb. Now it is years ahead of even Apple.