Matt Kapko

RCR Wireless News
Las Vegas — no matter how you slice it — has a one-of-a-kind allure. The city screams fantasy from every direction. The road to riches is within grasp, but only for a lucky few.

As the city grows by leaps and bounds, more and more wireless companies are placing bets on the random oasis in the desert that is Las Vegas. Except their bets are not up against the house, they want to blanket the house with wireless technology operating up in the ether.

Where Motorola first met CDMA

For years, Las Vegas has been a favorite test bed for companies looking to trial and demonstrate new cellular technologies.

Looking back to the second-generation technologies that were launched more than a decade ago, Las Vegas played host to Motorola Inc.’s first CDMA market in the United States. In 1996, the company took financial analysts, brokers and press out on a bus to demonstrate wireless calls being made on its first trial CDMA network.

Technology trials

“It’s a great test bed for the various technologies,” said Roy Berger, executive VP of corporate marketing at NextWave Wireless Inc.

The city’s never-ending flow of industry events, a wide demographic mix and a large transient population are all extremely useful, Berger said. There’s also the dense urban, suburban and rural communities that make up the city and surrounding area.

“I think everybody kind of recognizes the positive things that Las Vegas brings as a market to trial these new technologies,” he said.

“We’ve had a long presence in Las Vegas where we have trialed and implemented lots of technologies … and we continue to do so,” Berger added.

“For us, we have significant infrastructure capabilities there already,” he said. “We can implement a trial very quickly.”

And it has. Berger said the company has trialed “virtually all of the major wireless technologies that have become available over the course of the last several years.” Those trials included using the 1.9 GHz spectrum the company’s previous incarnation, NextWave Wireless L.L.C., received during the PCS auctions of the 1990s and eventually was able to sell following years of court battles with the Federal Communications Commission.

Now, NextWave is moving into LTE and other OFDM-based technologies. “We are very focused on OFDM technologies such as WiMAX and LTE,” Berger said, adding that WiMAX trials and pre-LTE trials are already underway.

“These are trials really to test the technology,” Berger said. “These are not commercial trials, these are more technology trials.”

NextWave’s team of several hundred engineers located in the San Diego area makes it easier from a geographical perspective as well. “It’s an easy market to get in and out of,” he said.

For NextWave, it’s simply an ideal locale to show off (and push the limit on) what their technologies can do, he said, adding that the company has no plans to go public with a commercial network in the city.

Its trial network in Las Vegas is currently operating TD-CDMA technology, Berger said.

Mobile TV

Last year, Las Vegas became a de facto mobile broadcast TV test market of sorts with MediaFLO USA Inc. and the now-defunct HiWire L.L.C. deploying their first trial networks there. Clearwire Corp. and ICO Global Communications Ltd. also have plans to trial a mobile TV network that will use satellites to broadcast directly to mobile devices.

“Las Vegas is as extreme a town as possible for in-building coverage,” HiWire President and COO Scott Wills said. “We didn’t plan on getting the pervasive in-building coverage that we got.”

In fact, Wills was most pleased with the service on the strip, because its second tower, which was positioned on the roof of the Rio Hotel and Casino, was at a significant disadvantage of only 5,000 watts of power. MediaFLO’s nearby tower powers at 50,000 watts. HiWire also had a transmission tower on Black Mountain near MediaFLO’s other tower that covers the area.

HiWire’s parent company Aloha Partners L.P. recently sold its 700 MHz spectrum assets to AT&T Inc. for $2.4 billion.

MediaFLO USA declined to share any details about its earlier trial network in Las Vegas.

“We analyze many factors in determining where we trial our coverage and these factors are specific to MediaFLO USA and are proprietary, therefore we are not able to share more information about where and why we trial coverage in specific markets,” a spokeswoman wrote in response to questions.

“(Las Vegas) was one of the several markets where we conducted trials and became commercialized. We conducted simultaneous trials in other markets too,” she wrote.

Beaming from space

Clearwire and ICO’s trial, which was first deployed in Raleigh, N.C., with plans to add a second trial in Las Vegas, marks the first time mobile television will be broadcast using digital video broadcast-satellite handheld technology, the companies said when the plan was first announced last year. DVB-SH is a variant of DVB-H that relies on satellite for delivery.

Although DVB-SH is largely unproven (only satellite radio can be pointed to as a similar service that’s commercially launched) for mobile TV services, ICO is sure it has the right technology up its sleeve. Instead of being a one-way satellite feed, ICO’s service will be two-way, enabling enhanced interactive services through a GEO-Mobile Radio interface to complement the video component.

“I feel really very confident that that’s the right technology for us,” CEO Tim Bryan said.

The trial will test the mobile video broadcast system and examine the feasibility of using Clearwire’s 2.5 GHz spectrum and ICO’s 2 GHz spectrum more efficiently.

The satellite-based service will also carry a terrestrial component to it, thanks in part to ICO’s partnership with Clearwire. A terrestrial repeater network will be used to fill in coverage where shadowing might occur near buildings.

“This is mostly meant to be a mobile service so we’re not specifically targeting in-building penetration,” Bryan said. “It won’t have quite the in-building coverage of something like 700 MHz.”

WiMAX

For those who haven’t had the chance to check out Clearwire’s larger mobile WiMAX trial network in Oregon, the company demonstrated its network capabilities in a partnership with Motorola earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Using a 10-megahertz channel per sector over 2.5 GHz Clearwire spectrum, Motorola took press and analysts out for a spin on the streets surrounding the convention center for demonstrations.

“The demo at CES has WiMAX equipment … but what they also added was a Wi-Fi router,” Clearwire’s CTO John Saw said. “The actual equipment itself was wired straight into WiMAX.” The companies decided to use a Wi-Fi router in the car to allow visitors to use their laptop computers to check out the network on their own.

Motorola and Clearwire told passengers that the unloaded network was providing downlink speeds of around 2.5 megabits per second and 500 kilobits per second to 1 Mbps on the uplink. Each cell site covered about 1 square kilometer, the companies said. Clearwire’s WiMAX network also served as the backhaul for the demonstration.

The vehicle had a streaming video camera that sent pictures of where the car was driving to the Internet, a mobile entertainment unit that streamed Yahoo Inc.’s Music service to the vehicle and a mapping application. Passengers were able to check e-mail and stream YouTube clips on their laptops.

Clearwire installed four base stations identical to the equipment it uses in Oregon for the demonstration and says some of those sites will actually serve as an early part of its network buildout in Las Vegas.

Saw said their trial is progressing equally well clear across the country. “We are now transitioning a technology into a product,” he said. “We are actually transitioning WiMAX into production.”

“Candidly, we are flushing out a lot of early technology issues,” he said.

RCR Wireless News
Look at a map of the lower 700 MHz E-Block auction results and one thing is clear: Dish Network Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. were battling for a nationwide swatch of spectrum ideal for broadcast services.

Neither got a nationwide footprint, but Dish just may have ruined MediaFLO USA Inc.’s chances for a more immediate nationwide expansion of service. The company bid nearly $712 million and won 168 licenses for 6 megahertz of unpaired spectrum in channel 56 throughout most of the country except for major cities in California, Arizona and the Northeast, which Qualcomm picked up. Dish’s license holdings cover 76% of the U.S. population.

“TV equals in today’s view a whole mess of channels,” Bill Ho, a senior analyst at Current Analysis, told RCR Wireless News. “You need more content and people have got to relate to it.”

MediaFLO USA Inc.’s network currently operates on channel 55 on which the Qualcomm subsidiary says it can support 20 live TV channels and a variety of other services such as audio and datacasting.

Many analysts expected Qualcomm to go after channel 56 to bolster its capacity. Although it’s not a technical requirement, having adjacent spectrum to its current holdings would be ideal.

“One would think that if you were going to expand your empire and your channel lineup,” Ho said. “But they lost it to EchoStar (Dish’s former name).”

By looking at the rounds of bidding, Ho determined that Dish won the bulk of its licenses early on, while Qualcomm outbid it on the more heavily contested licenses in later rounds. So while Dish may have thwarted Qualcomm’s attempts at a bigger channel lineup, Dish also suffers from not having nationwide coverage.

“Echostar definitely had a plan to make national availability,” Ho said.

But the real question is what would Dish do with the spectrum?

Many expect the company to leverage its mobile capabilities through Sling Media Inc., which it bought last fall for $380 million. Since the company sold its first SlingBox in mid-2004, it has expanded its reach into mobile with SlingPlayer Mobile, a mobile application, which it has now developed to work on most mobile operating systems.

Nic Covey, director of insights at Nielsen Mobile, agrees that SlingPlayer Mobile would be the obvious push, but suggested that the company could make a wireless play with its existing offerings.

“The opportunity is there for them to use that space to further activate SlingPlayer Mobile,” he said.

Despite what some may view as a slowing revenue generator, on-demand continues to be important for Dish, Covey said.

“For them it’s not necessarily just the revenue of an on-demand strategy,” he said.

“I think there are probably some creative ways that they can use it to execute on their on-demand,” he said. “I don’t want to underestimate the importance of that ondemand capability to them.”

Although he doubts the company will do both with the spectrum. “They can afford to do one of these things and make a big splash,” Covey said.

Don’t count anything out for Dish, said Current Analysis’ Ho.

“You can’t count out the technology,” he said. “Technology may work — it’s just a matter of, you know, you can make technology for everything.”

Content connections

Without knowing Dish’s plans it’s difficult to gauge the cost of a wireless network buildout, but it won’t come on the cheap, Ho said, adding that it’s current infrastructure comes with heavy cost as well. “Wireless is where everybody is going,” he said.

“Using satellite resources to deliver content is expensive,” Ho said. “Having another means of delivery, a broadcast mode, it could work.”

He adds that Dish’s current relationships are the most compelling aspect of any potential play in wireless. “The whole thing is that they’ve already got the content relationships,” he said.

Rights clearances and other usage limitations have been a major sticking point for entertainment companies looking to push content to mobile devices. Mobile TV providers have been equally perplexed by the bottleneck in content availability.

Indeed, Dish may never fully utilize the spectrum before it gets picked up by a larger competitor. Two months after EchoStar Communications Corp. purchased Sling Media, rumors surfaced that AT&T Inc. was eyeing the company for $29.5 billion.

“AT&T does have deep pockets,” Ho said, but even that acquisition would cause many to pause.

Dish and Qualcomm declined to comment for this story.

RCR Wireless News
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — With results from the Federal Communications Commission’s 700 MHz auction now public, Commissioner Robert McDowell said one thing stands out: large, deep-pocketed companies squeezed smaller (and in some cases newer) players out of the process — despite government mandates that were billed as an attempt at the exact opposite.

Open access, which the government imposed on the C Block, “sounds good if you say it fast, but when it comes in the form of a government mandate, what does it really mean?” McDowell asked rhetorically during a speech at the Tech Policy Summit here.

“What did prevail was the law of unintended consequences,” he said.

Although the open-access C Block was billed as a great opportunity for small, new players to enter the market, incumbent operators threw their financial weight around to insure continued dominance, McDowell said.

Verizon Wireless was the big winner in the 700 MHz auction, scooping up all of the C-Block licenses covering the continental United States. AT&T Mobility, another major, entrenched player, scooped up much of the remaining valuable spectrum.

And McDowell said it is clear that operators saw unencumbered spectrum as the biggest prize. The money plunked down on the open-access C Block averaged around 77 cents price per megahertz/potential customer covered, while the B Block, which did not include open-access stipulations, averaged around $2.67 per MHz/pop.

However, the average price for C-Block licenses includes spectrum covering the Gulf of Mexico and other out-of-the-way locations. According to Optimal Markets Inc., the average price per MHz/pop for the C-Block covering the Mississippi Valley region was $2.36.

McDowell, a Republican, made it clear he views the recent auction as a failed opportunity to bring more companies into the wireless business.

A light touch

McDowell believes market forces should determine what technologies, services and business models rise to the top. Much like America’s Internet economy, wireless won’t succeed and improve by “government fiat” but by innovation and collaboration in a free market, he argued.

“The five of us (FCC commissioners) are not smarter than the public sector,” he said. “Regulation should be reserved only for market failure.”

And with half of the world’s population now owning a cellphone, McDowell doesn’t believe there’s any cause for government alarm.

“No technology has ever penetrated more deeply than this has,” he said of cellular communications.

Moreover, he believes wireless carriers’ business models were already evolving.

“The biggest unwritten story is that device and application portability were already coming to the market long before the FCC ever got involved,” he said.

The FCC took credit for the parade of carriers that announced plans to open their networks to more devices and applications during the past few months, but it wasn’t the government’s doing, McDowell said.

He pointed to new dual-mode devices being offered by carriers that operate on unlicensed spectrum such as Wi-Fi, as well as the growing number of unlocked devices that are entering the market. “Overly engineered mandates” were not responsible for that rush of open networks announcements, he said.

The carriers were simply opposing the mandates, not the concept, he said.

RCR Wireless News
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — “Internet circa 1996,” M:Metrics senior analyst Seamus McAteer said. “If I had to give it a score, it’s a C-minus at best,” said Steve Smith, managing director at Playboy TV International. “I think it’s a complete miss, I’m going back to traditional TV,” said Bill Sanders, VP of mobile programming and digital at Sony Pictures Television International.

All this was said about the state of mobile television in the United States and in some cases abroad; although, to be fair, Sanders strongly hinted he was joking.

Still, in the grand scheme of things, mobile television is so far returning very little in the way of profit, subscriber numbers or overall viewers, according to those in the industry.

“Numbers are kind of small overall,” McAteer said during a panel at the Future of Television conference here. M:Metrics reports anywhere from 1% to 2% of wireless subscribers now use mobile TV services in the United States.

“We see decent takeaways when the service is optimized for mobile,” McAteer added, referencing successes in Italy and South Korea.

Still, nothing will drive adoption like free, he said.

TV for free

“My money’s on the YouTube model for now,” McAteer said. “I just think that free is a really promising way to build adoption.”

YouTube.com ranked as the No. 11 domain viewed by smartphones, according to M:Metrics measurements.

The majority of consumers won’t tolerate restrictions or schedules, said Derek Broes, senior VP of worldwide business development at Paramount Pictures.

“Look at how you can build something for the consumer,” he said. “We have to figure out how we can build these products that allow them to interact with them in ways that they want,” rather than “dictating” a specific approach.

“The consumer is going to do what they want to do, and if we don’t provide it to them they’re going to find a way to do it,” Broes concluded.

Sanders of Sony Pictures cast doubt on what he called the “one-to-many, one-way, non-interactive format” approach that most mobile TV vendors have taken. Most consumers will want an on-demand experience coupled with interactivity, he said.

“If linear TV on a portable device were so compelling, we’d be running around with Watchmen, which have been around 20 years,” Sanders said.

Clearance for mobile

Networks and studios are also walking a tight line on rights clearance and regulatory issues.

“Regulatory is a big issue for us,” said Smith of Playboy TV International. “I have to get approval on everything we use because of broader issues.”

Still, he admits it’s virtually impossible for the company to reach cellphones in the United States, due to wireless carriers’ tight control over the market.

“We’re completely shut out of this market because carriers won’t touch adult content,” Smith said.

Artistic expression

In the case of Paramount, Broes said long-standing, rigidly structured licensing agreements are preventing the company from pursuing more inventive ways of using its existing catalog. But beyond that, it’s art — and art doesn’t always lend itself to restrictions or drastic revisions.

“It’s not just clearance issues, it’s dealing with someone’s art form,” Broes said.

Discovery Communications holds a unique upper hand among its competitors when it comes to licensing, said Douglas Craig, the company’s senior VP of digital media.

“We’re somewhat fortunate in that most of our content is non-fiction in nature,” he said. “The content is evergreen, it doesn’t change that often.” Moreover, Discovery owns the “underlying rights,” he said.

Last year the company produced 17 made-for-mobile series, an even mix between re-purposed content from its most popular shows or original development.

RCR Wireless News
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Late-night talk-show host Carson Daly offered an insider’s view of the future of television during a speech at the storied Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel here yesterday afternoon. The 34-year-old entertainer, who climbed the ladder from radio to TV, said he has straddled two worlds — old-school and new-school media — for years now.

“I’m a traditional media guy by day and a new media student by night,” Daly said. “My thinking has been if I live in both of these worlds maybe I can bring them together.”

Call it a “dual citizenship” of traditional and modern television, he said. “I’m passionate about what I do, I’m passionate about where the industry’s heading.”

Still, new media distribution outlets such as online and mobile aren’t the end-all-be-all, Daly said. “I believe that TV is nowhere near dead.”

Indeed, every homemade YouTube superstar is still aspiring toward one end — the big screen or the TV screen, he said.

“The big play is to get a deal with the big boys, the TV execs,” Daly added.

“I think it’s pretty funny that the buzz today is about empowering users, but TV’s been doing that for decades,” he said.

Distributions

When cable television came to the scene in the 1980s, it forced market players to approach everything differently.

“The Internet to me is just a cracked-out version of what happened to cable,” he said. “The biggest difference is the distribution. This is where we must think of things differently.”

“If you ask TV what’s the biggest problem I think they’ll tell you that they’re losing viewers,” Daly said. However, he said social-networking sites that engage TV show fans could ebb that flow, he said.

RCR Wireless News
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Qualcomm Inc.’s push into the broadcast mobile TV space has been going slower than the company would like, CEO Paul Jacobs said in a keynote at the Tech Policy Summit here this morning.

Qualcomm’s subsidiary MediaFLO USA Inc. introduced services with Verizon Wireless more than a year ago and has plans to launch through AT&T Mobility, although that rollout has suffered multiple delays.

“(The carriers) haven’t spent a lot of advertising on it to this point,” Jacobs said, adding that they may be waiting for MediaFLO to increase its coverage.

“It’s not as nationwide as we would have liked,” he said. “We’re really waiting for February 2009 to get the real digital transition done.”

TV broadcasters, some of which operate in the same spectrum that MediaFLO is waiting to launch services in, are to retire analog broadcasts by February and move off the spectrum.

Jacobs didn’t address the continued MediaFLO delays at AT&T Mobility. Sources familiar with the matter say legal issues involving Qualcomm’s chipset are partly to blame. The issue stems from the International Trade Commission’s ruling against the importation of Qualcomm’s chips; Verizon Wireless last year inked a licensing deal with Broadcom Corp. — which brought the action against Qualcomm to the ICT — in order to sidestep such legal issues.

“People try and characterize us as a litiguous company, but the reality is companies came after us,” Jacobs said. “It’s easy for a company to come in and stretch a patent very broadly. It’s very difficult for a jury to understand these very complex technological issues.”

Patent reform

In discussing Qualcomm’s legal quandries, Jacobs took up the issue of patent reform, which is currently wending its way through Congress.

“I think some of the patent reform legislation goes a little bit too far,” Jacobs said. “We have some concerns about things like the post-grant review,” which Qualcomm views as at attempt to change existing standards that would revise an already-helpful framework.

“In the post-grant review issue right now, we’re talking about changing the burden of proof, but we think that’s not such a good idea,” he said. “We don’t want some of those things to change, but there’s clearly some middle ground to be found.”

Spectrum reform

Qualcomm’s chief executive also addressed spectrum issues, but declined to discuss the company’s plans for licenses it recently won in the 700 MHz auction. Qualcomm spent around $500 million for a handful of licenses.

Jacobs argued that the government needs to free up more spectrum for private enterprise.

“There’s still more spectrum out there,” Jacobs said. “We like the idea of getting more spectrum available because the data usage is coming up.”

He pointed out that nearly 500 MHz of low-frequency spectrum currently resides in unlicensed bands, which Qualcomm would like to see brought into the fold.

“Unlicensed isn’t very good for wide-area services because you can have all kinds of interference,” he said. “I believe that that spectrum should be licensed.”

Recruiting troubles

Finally, Jacobs spoke strongly against immigration issues that have caused a brain drain at companies like Qualcomm, which are agressively recruiting young talent out of American colleges.

“I fundamentally think that this is one of the scariest things going on in the United States right now,” he said.

He added that more than 60% of the people Qualcomm hires out of univiersities are foreign born.

“That’s the kind of ratios that are in schools,” he said. “If we’re sending people home that’s pretty scary.”

Qualcomm intends to apply for 400 visas next month, but expects only half to get approved.

“It’s a really bad situation right now,” Jacobs said. “It’s gotten too political.”

RCR Wireless News
BURLINGAME, Calif. — The idea of wireless handsets and home consumer electronics being interconnected, seamlessly sharing content is one that would be a boom for many in the entertainment business, but rights and licensing issues remain a thorn that deflates the opportunity.

At last week’s Digital Living Room Summit, the topic kept creeping up in talks with content owners, electronics manufacturers, entertainment portals and software developers.

“We’re seeing a whole lot of confusion, which causes the consumer to not buy,” said Richard Bullwinkle, chief evangelist at Macrovision Corp.

The seemingly bottomless pool of digital media formats, license allowances and usage rights has driven down the value of new media, some argued. Indeed, vinyl records continue to maintain value to this day whereas a simple song or video clip purchased electronically might only work with one device type or worse yet, one company’s products.

Hollywood will have to drive whatever solution it sees best fit to enable consumers to take their media with them without thinking about all that.

“No one wants to get pigeonholed within a single silo,” said Shawn Ambwani, VP at Intertrust Technologies Corp.

Consumers aren’t going to come to the digital world in droves unless they can transfer their content among numerous devices, he said.

Ambwani said the task essentially calls for the industry to take an existing business model and transfer it to a virtual world, adding that different media types will require varying approaches.

“The use cases for music and movies are quite different,” he said, explaining the reason for different pricing schemes associated with each.

“Movies, the viewing experience is typically once or twice,” he added. “The majority of this stuff you want to watch once or twice.”

Robin Wilson, VP at Nagravision, said a neutral body would probably be best suited to sort out a set of standardized media formats and licensing rights. Today there are numerous standards bodies with no responsibility, he said. “You need a certification authority,” Wilson added.

Brad Hunt, a digital media consultant, talked about video fingerprinting technology that’s being developed to enable content filtering, rights management and monetization. Technology like this will be necessary for wireless devices and living room entertainment systems to work in sync, he said.

The largest move from Hollywood thus far has been the OpenMarket Initiative led by Sony Pictures Television International, he said. “These companies are coming together to create a DRM interoperability solution,” Hunt said.

The organization, which has mostly been operating in the background, plans to endorse several DRM formats that will all be part of an overarching framework, he said.

“The ID with all of these types of services, it almost has to be transparent to the consumer,” Hunt said.

The idea is that consumers’ sets of devices will all be registered with a domain service provider, which is responsible for fulfilling the DRM package across all devices — an approach called domain-based DRM. It’s all about moving away from copy management and toward domain management. “This is an electronic sell through of the content, but I’m not restricted from copying it,” Hunt explained.

RCR Wireless News
BURLINGAME, Calif. — The perception of what wireless technologies can enable for other industries is years, if not decades, ahead of reality. As mobile devices have ever-so-steadily become a pocket-sized version of personal computers, they still deliver nowhere near the experience and capabilities of their heftier counterparts.

“I think we’re still early in terms of delivering a good mobile entertainment experience,” Jessica Steel, VP at Pandora, said at the Digital Living Room Summit last week.

At best, mobile entertainment has reached its teenage years — full of promise and tenacity, yet still years away from self-reliance.

The sky is literally the limit as to where mobile devices and wireless technology might fit in to a connected and untethered personal entertainment system, but few tangibles have been realized thus far.

Will cellphones simply become an alternative remote control for the living room or will they share content (purchased and free) with an ever-growing array of consumer electronics? Most in this business are clearly hoping for the latter end of the spectrum, however much stands in the way.

Intuitive search, user interfaces, licensing issues and supported media formats all need to be resolved industrywide. Such a feat will require collaboration and the blessing of Hollywood.

Show them the money

Moreover, as Jaime Fink, VP at 2 Wire Inc., pointed out: providers aren’t likely to enable and deliver an all-wireless solution to customers unless it leads to new services that they can monetize.

Intel Corp. has been studying consumers’ home entertainment likes and dislikes as it aims to bring Internet connections to all electronics in the living room.

“We think it’s absolutely critical that we understand what’s happening in the living room,” said William Leszinske, general manager of consumer electronics at Intel.

“Consumers have a very love-hate and intense relationship with their television,” he said, adding that although viewing is passive in nature, it’s much more of a social engagement than it might seem.

“While the TV experience is very entrenched we don’t think it’s going to change overnight,” Leszinske said in his keynote.

Truly, Madly, Deeply

For now the company is focusing on learning what consumers want from a deeper experience in the living room.

“When you talk about the Internet, the relationship people have with their PCs is very, very different from their television,” he said. “I don’t think people want a browsing experience.”

Leszinske believes a user interface will evolve when broadband, broadcast and on-demand content are forged together. And whoever develops a system that strikes a balance between an online- and TV-like experience will win the day, he said.

“You want to create an experience on the mobile device that is relevant to the living room,” Hillcrest Labs CEO Dan Simpkins said. “You really have to use the right tool for the job.”

Search is one function that practically every panelist throughout the conference agreed would be important to the viability of ecosystems to come.

Steven King, VP of marketing at Hitachi America Ltd., demonstrated the capabilities of Entier, an embedded database the company build to serve all platforms. The textual-based search application boasts a significant reduction in code and the use of meta data and geospacial tags, which enables users to pull up a contact based on where he or she was when they entered that new information in the device, for example. “Search the way you think,” the company likes to say of the embedded database.

Entier handles multiple data types and formats with response times in the tens of milliseconds.

King said handset vendors have been the quickest to catch up with their technology as they and wireless carriers have warmed to the idea of incorporating third-party database search solutions.

“We are working with a mobile handset vendor that is implementing those kinds of searches today,” he said.

RCR Wireless News
The European Commission has formally adopted Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld (DVB-H) technology as the standard for mobile television throughout the European Union’s 27 member states.

The move was entirely expected despite objections from three of the EU’s most powerful members, some of whom where calling for the listing of all competing standards for broadcast mobile TV.

Yet, with DVB-H having taken an early and definitive lead throughout the region as the most widely used standard, the Commission has been moving toward adding the technology to the EU’s list of standards since July 2007.

The agency stopped short of legislating DVB-H as the region’s mandated standard. By listing it as a standard, the technology becomes the preferred distribution platform for broadcast mobile TV, but doesn’t preclude competitors like Qualcomm Inc. from pushing its MediaFLO technology into the market. Moreover, Qualcomm has repeatedly pointed out that additional standards can be added to the list anytime. Nonetheless, member states are now required to encourage the use of DVB-H as the single listed standard.

Still, Viviane Reding, the EU’s Commissioner for the Information Society and Media, has pushed for a single standard to stave off further market fragmentation and speed up the launch of mobile TV services.

“For mobile TV to take off in Europe, there must first be certainty about the technology. This is why I am glad that with today’s decision, taken by the Commission in close coordination with the member states and the European Parliament, the EU endorsed DVB-H as the preferred technology for terrestrial mobile broadcasting,” she said following today’s announcement.

“The next steps for implementing the EU strategy on mobile broadcasting will include guidance on the authorization regimes as well as the promotion of rights management systems based, as is DVB-H, on open standards,” she added.

The commission predicts the mobile TV market could reach 500 million customers and bring in $31.5 billion by 2011. DVB-H is currently between trials and commercial launch in 16 EU countries, according to the commission. Commercial services are available in Italy now, with launches expected later this year in Finland, Austria, France, Switzerland and Spain.

DVB-H has all but fallen off the map in the United States, with its two-largest backers no longer operating trials. AT&T Mobility acquired Aloha Partners L.P.’s 700 MHz spectrum holdings, effectively ending its HiWire L.L.C. subsidiary’s DVB-H trial last year, and Crown Castle International Corp. sold spectrum it once planned to use to offer live, broadcast TV services after failing to find a carrier partner.

AT&T Mobility’s plan to launch broadcast mobile TV services with MediaFLO USA Inc. has suffered multiple delays, yet sources point to a launch in a couple weeks at CTIA Wireless 2008 in Las Vegas.

RCR Wireless News
The explosive success networks are having with text voting on TV shows comes with a level of responsibility that they and others in the value chain are trying to bear.

“Now the viewer or participant has to be able to trust the show,” said Suhail Bhat, policy and initiatives director at the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF). “It’s different now. It’s not passive, it’s active.”

The Mobile Marketing Association and MEF have both drafted guidelines for participation-TV in the United States based on feedback from their member organizations. With two sets of guidelines now released, plenty of less-involved companies have wondered which organization takes the lead as the de facto standard in this market.

While the MEF has plenty of activity and clout with its members, the MMA’s Consumer Best Practices Guidelines, which includes a section on participation-TV, has taken the lead as the more adopted standard to follow in the United States. MEF is strong in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe whereas MMA’s guidelines have been followed by carriers in the United States since 2005.

“These guidelines are part of the contractual agreement at the carriers

between every carrier, content or aggregate provider,” MMA President Laura Marriott said. “In the United States the guidelines that MEF has produced, they’re not the guidelines followed by the operators.”

Indeed, MEF’s Code of Best Practice for Participation TV Services in the U.S. builds on its experiences in the British market and addresses the more serious inquiries broadcasters there have faced over numerous failures in the system. “We know what’s gone wrong. We understand where in the value chain things have gone wrong,” Bhat said, adding that its role in the United States is more about educating all those players before similar breakdowns occur.

“Even with the best will in the world, something can go wrong,” he said.

“For the moment, it provides education and sets up responsibilities for the companies involved,” Bhat said of the MEF’s guidelines.

“It’s about sharing and understanding that responsibility,” he said. “A lot of this, believe it or not, is getting people to talk to each other and understand their relative roles.”

While the MMA’s guidelines have more official backing in the United States, both organizations have many of the same members from this market. Rob Kramer, a spokesman for VeriSign Inc., sits on committees that develop and revise participation-TV guidelines at both organizations.

“We follow the MMA guidelines and take the MEF guidelines into account as well, but here in this market we follow the MMA guidelines,” he said. MMA has more of a North American focus, while MEF is more European centric, he added.

Indeed, there is little difference in the common thrust of both sets of rules. “General participating guidelines I think are very similar,” Kramer said. MEF’s document explains the issues other markets have faced and sets that as a framework for practices in the United States while MMA’s set focuses more on the rules that in turn are adopted by U.S. carriers.

Carrier guidelines in the United States vary state by state while the European market differs in each country. So companies are tipped toward one set of guidelines over another depending on which market they’re operating in and which set of rules have been adopted industrywide in that market.

“But that could change. Either organization could develop more of a global approach to participation TV,” Kramer said. “It’s something that we’ll probably have to address in the future between the two organizations.”

Telescope Inc., which manages interactive voting components for numerous shows, has executives sitting on committees at both MEF and MMA.

“They both have the right intention, which is instilling public trust and making sure the industry grows responsibly,” Telescope CEO Troy Sample said. “It’s a critical piece of the industry’s growth.”

The important thing is “making sure there’s some enforcement of those practices,” he said.

In the U.S., most of that responsibility falls with the carriers, Bhat said. “What matters is that somebody takes responsibility.”

The two sets of guidelines that address the U.S. market aren’t mutually exclusive, he said. “They’re not at loggerheads. They don’t compete with each other whatsoever,” Bhat added.