Orange's 'high-definition' mobile TV

Orange will introduce improved image quality for its mobile TV services. This enhancement, called 'TV HD Mobile', will be launched in France this month. It is based on the combination of 250kbit/s streaming, MPEG4 encoding and QVGA screen resolution.

Only one compatible handset, the Samsung Z560, will be available when the service is launched. Orange will market compatible handsets with the 'TV HD mobile' label, as a guarantee of quality of service for the customer. The enhanced mobile TV service (which already provides access to around 50 channels) will cost €12/month for unlimited usage.

Comment: The term 'high-definition' may be a bit excessive but having seen a demo of this service on the Samsung device, we think this is a major improvement of video quality in comparison with current mobile TV over 3G services. Quality is very important in encouraging wide adoption and usage of TV and video services on mobile phones. The poor quality of services currently available affects much of the user experience for most live sport programmes, for example.

Mobile TV over the HSDPA network has the potential to provide similar quality to that of mobile TV over dedicated broadcast networks (DVB-H, MediaFLO, etc.). So from the user point of view the technology used for delivery may not be apparent - users would not know whether they are watching video over 3G or over DVB-H. For example, a user may subscribe to a single mobile TV and VoD service that uses broadcast delivery for some channels, 3G network delivery for other live TV channels and on-demand content, but with a consistent quality of service and user interface across all delivery technologies.

This 'high-definition' mobile TV service is the cornerstone of Orange's strategy for the launch of consumer HSDPA in the continued success of its early TV/video services (currently around 350,000 active users and 5m TV or VoD sessions per month). Orange also investigates different solutions for mobile broadcast (in particular DVB-H, Satellite DVB-H and TDtv). However, the 3G network will still play an important role in VoD, interactive services and also live TV: Orange already offers 50 live TV channels in its bouquet and only half of these can be carried over a DVB-H multiplex.

(c) Ovum

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