Mobile DTV Groups Need to Merge, Industry Officials say

The Mobile500 Alliance and the Mobile Content Venture group need to combine to help foster a national mobile DTV service in the U.S., broadcasters and equipment suppliers told us at the SatCon 2010 conference in New York this week.

The two organizations formed earlier this year and so far have staked out separate turfs. The Mobile500 Alliance, consisting of a group of station owners -- Freedom Communications, Gray TV, Nexstar, Pappas Telecasting and others -- collectively hold 346 full-power TV licenses in 197 markets and appear to favor an ad-supported business for free over-the-air TV. MCV, which has the backing of NBC, Fox, Ion and the so-called Pearl Nine -- Post-Newsweek, Gannett, Belo, Cox and others -- is leaning toward a pay-TV subscription model for national and local broadcasting, industry officials said.

MCV also is stocked with TV stations in the top 25 U.S. markets, areas where many Mobile500 members have thin coverage. While Mobile500 has threatened to seek rights agreements separate from MCV, industry officials we polled said it’s also seeking to gain equal-footing with MCV.

"The groups will work through it,” said an executive at major supplier of mobile DTV broadcast equipment. “You lay the two groups out side-by-side and the markets and they have to come together at some point. MCV is well aware that they don’t want to be adversarial with Mobile500 because they are going to need each other."

While mobile DTV ad-supported and pay-TV businesses could co-exist, for consumers the service must be “ubiquitous because they are only going to use one device,” James Kutzner, PBS chief engineer for technology and operations, told us. Mobile DTV is “such a new thing that to try to divide the market wouldn’t work."

While the cost of entry is relatively small -- stations pay about $150,000 to add equipment needed to deliver mobile DTV -- other issues like broadcast rights and business models are more daunting, said Ron Stitt, Fox Television vice president of digital media and Internet operations. “There’s also the question of how does this play in the carrier world and the whole landscape still has to settle out,” Stitt said.

NBC Universal, which is a founding member of MCV, struggles with balancing the desire for providing pay-TV services with the need to support the mobile DTV launch, said Salil Dalvi, senior vice president of mobile platform development. “The constant tension is if we need to get paid for our content, how do we drive sampling, usage and create awareness of new platforms that people aren’t necessarily familiar with from day one?” Dalvi said. “We will continue to wrestle with that issue on new platforms like mobile. But over the long horizon you always think about having that pay model whether its through distribution feeds or consumer subscriptions.”

Mobile DTV’s first “consumer showcase” in Washington, D.C., which featured nine broadcasters delivering 23 channels to about 150 Samsung Moment cellphones, Dell mini-notebooks and LG Electronics mobile DTV/DVD player and a Tivizon adapter, closes Oct. 30. While a new rollout schedule for mobile DTV hasn’t been set, about 70 stations are equipped to deliver the service, up from 50 in July, industry officials said. Harris, which has installed MPH mobile DTV systems at most stations, also is continuing tests of its scalable full-channel mobile mode technology that enables up to 16 different video programs to be sent in the same 6 MHZ bandwidth used by a TV broadcaster, said Jay Adrick, vice president of broadcast technology at Harris. The technology, which Harris developed with LG Electronics, could be available within six months, Adrick said. Harris is said to be testing the full-channel service with Dish Network, which operates channel 56 in Las Vegas.

PBS also tested datacasting in Washington, D.C. using a “small” portion of available bandwidth and is “discussing” with its affiliates providing a dedicated mobile DTV feed, Kutzner said. “It’s about what the cost will be and we need to be just ahead of our stations so we are there with the support when they need it,” Kutzner said. “But we don’t want to be too far out because then we are just wasting our time."

In Washington, PBS delivered children’s programming and the East Coast HD feed from Howard University’s WHUT-TV station, Kutzner said. It also used mobile DTV bandwidth to deliver FM radio feeds from American University’s WAMU and WETA in Arlington, Va., he said.