Elgato, Dyle Mobile TV Launch $99 Add-On Module For iPhones

Elgato and Mobile Content Venture’s Dyle Mobile DTV platform are looking to ride the smartphone and tablet wave with Elgato’s linear TV module and Dyle’s mobile DTV service, Salil Dalvi, senior vice president and general manager of digital distribution for NBC Universal and co-general manager of MCV’s Dyle Mobile DTV, told Consumer Electronics Daily during a press tour in New York.

The companies this week announced EyeTV Mobile, a $99 dongle with a mini ATSC-M/H tuner that snaps into a 30-pin iOS connector to deliver over-the-air broadcast channels via Dyle’s encrypted TV service to iPhones and iPads. It will work with iPhone 5 and iPad Mini with an adapter, the companies said. The dongle is available from Amazon, Elgato and other retailers. Dyle mobile DTV service launched earlier this year in Audiovox mobile TV receivers for in-vehicle DVD systems and as an embedded service inside a Samsung Galaxy Lightray smartphone with built-in antenna that’s sold through MetroPCS.

While real-time over-the-air TV viewership has been declining as consumers opt for on-demand video and the convenience of DVRs, Dalvi believe Dyle’s advantage is its data-independent alternative to mobile users on the go. “We take that living room experience of broadcast television and make it available” on mobile devices, which isn’t currently possible with smartphones and tablets,” he said. The EyeTV is most useful out of home, he said, citing the example of viewing TV while sitting at a sporting event as an optimal use case. Consumers trying to access Wi-Fi in a crowded stadium often experience network traffic on a cellular network, he said, but consumers bringing in TV over-the-air wouldn’t experience those issues, he said. MCV expects customers to use its service as an add-on to their cable and Internet TV solutions.

Availability varies by market, with the decision to broadcast a mobile signal being the choice of individual broadcasters who have to make a roughly $100,000 investment now or “wait until more devices are in the market,” Dalvi said. Most of the investment is in the encoder, he said. Four local broadcasters in New York - NBC, Fox, Telemundo, and Cubo - are broadcasting ATSC-MH signals, and Dallas adds CBS and ABC to its mix.

Officially, 93 stations are broadcasting Dyle TV service, Dalvi said, but users can receive ATSC-M/H service as well. Dyle encrypts its signal for conditional access, requiring users to register to use the service. To help seed the market, the venture is not charging a subscription fee for content this year; plans haven’t been set for 2013 or beyond, Dalvi said. “We don’t expect a large number of devices in 2013; it’s still continuing to grow,” Dalvi said. The company hasn’t determined the business model long-term, Dalvi said, but by encrypting the signal it has the choice to pursue several models: ad-supported, free content; a direct subscription model; or an authentication model that’s linked to a cable or satellite subscription.

Dalvi wouldn’t disclose the number of Dyle-compatible devices in the pipeline citing confidentiality agreements. Dalvi said the iOS app would be free, but the Dyle TV website listed the app price as $4.99. The device will not work with the PC platform, it said.

Coverage and interference are a challenge for any over-the-air service and Dalvi conceded that the service “doesn’t cover 100 percent of every nook and cranny of every market.” But “neither does wireless,” he added. Home is not an intended use for the service, he said, where cable, satellite and Wi-Fi offer more robust alternatives, he said. Dyle expects to have coverage in 35 markets by year-end, reaching 55 percent of the population. A coverage map on the Dyle website shows a number of states, largely in the West and Midwest, with no access to the service.

Native resolution of the broadcast signal being used for Dyle TV is 416 x 240, said Scott Stemmermann, director of product development, and signals are delivered at a 400 kbps bitrate. Aspect ratios of either 16:9 or 4:3 are determined by broadcasters, he said. The signal “works very well up to the size of an iPad” before pixelization occurs, Dalvi said. We saw significant pixelization in our brief demo of the system, especially during a motion-filled soccer segment on Telemundo.

On future features, Dalvi said the company “would look very closely” at a DVR option for the service, “but the question is how do you do that in a way that respects whatever business model we ultimately settle on,” Dalvi said. He wouldn’t speculate on a minimum market population of devices that Dyle would deem a success but said the ultimate hope is for it to be a “mainstream” product. Counting cellphones, tablets, cars and other screen-based CE devices, Dalvi estimated the addressable market at some 500 million devices.

EyeTV is initially iOS-specific due to the large, standardized iOS platform, but Android is “very much on the roadmap if we can do it in a smart way,” he said. Android is “trickier because you have different versions of the operating system,” he said. There’s no standardization around the Android hardware, he added, “so when you look at things like CPU and graphics processors and how the video gets encoded on those devices, there are lots of different flavors of hardware and software.” While Android has a “huge installed base, you have to pick segments of that installed base to address Android effectively,” he said, acknowledging that “it would be foolish for us to write off that market because it’s a real platform and we have to address that.”

On a small scale, Dyle TV is about having live television on a mobile device, Dalvi said. The bigger picture is that the device runs independent of data minutes and doesn’t require Wi-Fi “so there’s a lot more you can do with this platform,” he said. Dalvi envisions shorter form, predictable format shows that are “easy to go in and out of” as the types of programs users will be drawn to. Early indications are that user sessions with the service are largely in “15-minute bites” although some users have extended viewing to as much as two hours, he said. Battery life of the Elgato module, which uses a rechargeable battery, is in “hours, not minutes,” Stemmermann said. Battery consumption on an iPhone or iPad is “typical” for video viewing, he said.

"We're not trying to compete with Hulu or YouTube or Netflix because those are on-demand platforms that you choose to watch,” Dalvi said. Dyle is more likely to be used in situations where viewers don’t want to go to the trouble of downloading or streaming but instead want to tune in “to see what’s on,” he said. Simplicity is the service’s most appealing sell, he said.

As traditional broadcast economics continue to face challenges, broadcasters, especially smaller ones, could choose to devote more bandwidth to signals for mobile devices versus standard TV, Dalvi said. “Maybe not NBC or Fox, but smaller broadcasters may decide to deliver other content through this pipe,” he said.

Dyle TV mobile TV service is operated by MCV, a joint venture of media groups including Belo, Cox Media, E.W. Scripps, Gannett Broadcasting, Hearst Television, Media General, Meredith, Post-Newsweek Stations, Raycom Media, Fox, ION Television and NBC.