WhyDom

A lot has been happening with MediaFlo mobile video.   After considerable study,  the European Union’s Executive Commission decided on July 18, 2007, that it would recommend that EU countries use Europe’s home grown DVB-H (“Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds”) standard, and not the MediaFlo standard.    The EC decision may well have been driven by the fact that DVB-H is a standard driven by Europe’s own hometown team, Nokia.  Unlike Qualcomm-owned MediaFlo, DVB-H though is an open standard which can be licensed by any carrier.  As Broadcast Engineering  noted, in selecting DVB-H the EC also rejected the WorldDMB’s  T-MDB technology.  Germany had already launched T-MDB last year and France planned to launch T-MDB next year.   

The EC’s decision has the same feeling of the GSM v CDMA battle that occurred a decade ago.  The results seem to be following the same path with Qualcomm/MediaFlo turning its focus from Europe to the US and Asia.  MediaFlo has achieved success in the U.S. with Verizon’s V-Cast and AT&T’s U-verse “OnTheGo” mobile solution and also in Asia with the Malaysia trial.     However, even in the Americas, the DVB v Flo battle is going strong as the EC announced on August 31, 2007, that Uruguay adopted the DVB-T standard.   The EC is hoping for a domino effect in Latin America. Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, stated “I trust that other countries in the region will follow [Uruguay] soon.”  In Asia, Taiwan is also testing DVB-H. 

Research firms, not surprisingly, are projecting similar geographically-based take rates for mobile video standards.  IMS Research is projecting that 60% of MediaFlo’s subscribers will be from the U.S.   On the other hand, IMS projects that Europe will have 61% of the DVB-H/DVB-SH worldwide.    

Does the EC’s decision mean that MediaFlo is cut off from Europe as Qualcomm was cut out in the GSM v CDMA battle?  Or will government-geographically based technical mandates wane now that solutions are easier to implement as the large towers required are already in place and cell phones are in the hands of the buyers?   This was not the case in the early 1990’s with the GSM v CDMA battle over cell phone service where the towers were not constructed and the base of cell phone users had to be built from scratch.