Motorola, Nokia Promote Mobile TV Standard

Companies are working together to ensure their DVB-H phones and network equipment are compatible.

Motorola and Nokia are partnering to make sure their mobile TV phones and network equipment work together in an effort to speed the introduction of new services, they said on Monday.

The mobile giants plan to make sure their DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld) phones and equipment are interoperable, so that handsets from each manufacturer will operate on network gear built by the other.

Cooperation Should Speed Adoption
DVB-H is a standard, approved by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, and products that conform to the standard should interoperate in any case. But many standards require vendors to work closely with each other to ensure their products work well together.

"By testing our solutions we are enabling operators to bring these services to their subscribers faster," Rob Bero, director of broadcast technologies for Motorola, said via e-mail. The partnership will assure operators evaluating mobile TV that services will work smoothly regardless of which of the companies' handsets and network gear they are using, he said.

In addition to working with each other, Motorola and Nokia will continue to take part in industry-wide standards efforts, they said.

Competing Mobile-TV Standards
DVB-H is one of a few competing standards in the mobile TV arena. Motorola and Nokia say that support DVB-H because it offers high service quality, low battery consumption and the ability for users to receive TV broadcasts at the same time they use other phone functions, such as voice and Internet access.

In Germany, service providers launched mobile TV offerings in June using another standard, T-DMB (Terrestrial-Digital Multimedia Broadcasting). And in the U.K., British Telecommunications PLC uses a combination of DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) and IP in a mobile TV network that Virgin Mobile plans to start offering next month.

Qualcomm has developed still another mobile TV technology, MediaFLO, which it is using to build a network in the U.S. Many operators are also delivering mobile TV by streaming programming over their mobile Internet networks.



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