Italians Will Watch World Cup On Handsets

PARIS — With the opening of the World Cup soccer tournament this week (June 9), Hutchison Whampoa subsidiary 3 Italia is the first European service provider offering commercial mobile TV broadcasts of matches.

Subscribers will be able to watch all 64 FIFA World Cup matches in their entirety rather than short video clips. They can be viewed on mobile handsets supplied by LG Electronics and Samsung that comply with with the DVB-H standard.

While 3 Italia is a 3G cellular network operator, it chose to build a separate new mobile broadcast TV network—based on the DVB-H spec—to offer mobile TV services.

As many as 30 DVB-H trials are said to be going on now in Europe, including some in which users are receiving World Cup games on their handsets. A few 3G network operators are also planning to show snippets of matches via their UMTS network. However, a 3 Italia spokesman said, "If you want to watch an entire game of any of the 64 matches, you can only do it with us and on a DVB-H network."

Despite the hype about single-chip mobile TV solutions touted by companies like Texas Instruments, the early design winners for commercial DVB-H handsets turned out to be much smaller silicon vendors armed with proven, specialized chips. These include Microtune (Plano, Texas) and DiBcom (Palaiseau, France).

LG mobile handsets, dubbed LG U900, incorporate Microtune's DVB-H TV tuner and DiBcom's DVB-H demodulator IC to receive mobile TV services. A multimedia chip from Renesas is used to decode the digital mobile TV streams compressed in H.264 video and AAC+ audio.

Samsung's P910 handsets were supposed to be available to 3 Italia's subscribers by the end of May but have yet to surface in Italian stores, according to sources there. Samsung's DVB-H phones use Freescale's DVB-H tuner with DiBcom's DVB-H demodulator chip. While observers have speculated that the delayed Samsung handset may have been caused by technical glitches of its TV reception capabilities, a 3 Italia spokesman insisted Samsung handsets will be in stores by Friday (June 9).

Both mobile TV handsets are heavily subsidized by 3 Italia. If consumers sign up for a 49 euro per month subscription for 23 months, they receive a free mobile TV handset. That monthly subscription fee is "an all- inclusive deal," according to the 3 Italia spokesman, including access to all nine mobile TV channels (the total will be increased to 14 channels by mid July), one hour of free international phone calls and 1 gigabyte of data transmission and Internet navigation.

With no mobile TV service subscription, LG's U900 mobile TV phone costs 499 euros.

3 Italia was mum on the subscribers signed up for its mobile TV service. The operator-broadcaster is nevertheless sticking to its original projection of 500,000 subscribers by the end of 2006.

3 Italia claims its mobile TV service reaches 70 percent of the Italian population, but a spokesman noted that "this is outdoor coverage, not indoor coverage."

DiBcom, which won designs for both LG and Samsung phones to be used in Italy, has shipped more than 1 million DVB-H demodulation chips. CEO Yannick Levy said: "DVB-H performance is particularly important for operators in their initial network build out [since] it directly translates into their network cost."

Microtune’s President and CEO James Fontaine called the commercial mobile TV service rollout a "catalyst," adding, "Italy will force other countries to start asking questions [about] why they don't have any mobile TV services."