Broadcast Asia
Posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 9:04pm. #
BroadcastAsia is the big show in Singapore in mid-June. This year I was speaking there; and I took the chance of looking around the show - as well as the neighbouring CommunicAsia.
Symptomatic of the convergence that is going on was the arrangement of the halls. CommunicAsia had transmission companies instead of BroadcastAsia, for example. People selling cabling or fibre-optics were similarly in CommunicAsia. In order to see everything, you needed to examine both shows.
Nokia-Siemens, the company that looks after mobile phone network infrastructure, had a mobile phone internet browser on display. Nothing revolutionary, perhaps, except for the technology at the network operators. This put interstitial advertising, or splash screens, into the mobile user experience - enabling mobile networks to, worryingly, insert advertising into other peoples’ websites. Putting aside the intrusiveness of this for a minute, the implications for web companies are scary. If, using Vodafone, I visit amazon.co.uk, I could get advertising for HMV.co.uk right in the middle of my purchase. Visitors to the BBC News website could see advertising appearing ‘on’ the site. A network operator could put pornographic ads in the middle of the Disney site. Consumers would be confused as to where these ads had come from. I put these slightly inflammatory points to the eager man with a Finnish name who manned the stand. He agreed, happily, that this technology could do all of the above. He didn’t comment on whether it was the right thing to do.
Also, on Nokia-Siemens, was a demonstration of their MBMS service. This uses frequencies owned by the telcos to offer a broadcast, one-to-many, experience for things like mobile TV. Unlike DVB-H, it uses existing cellsites; and unlike DVB-H, it can also be routed dynamically - in much the same way as I describe in my inventions page. So, a popular channel can come off unicast and be broadcast; maintaining efficient use of the network. Capacity for this is around 1.5 meg; that compares to roughly 2 meg for a DAB multiplex. Two things of particular importance to the UK here: first, this uses existing frequencies (so no need to wait for the DVB-H spectrum to be freed-up); and my understanding is that there are three chunks of this spectrum ready to go, for all operators except T-Mobile. So, is this the death-before-life of DVB-H? Possibly: the main hurdle is that an MBMS receiver has to be a mobile phone, so this won’t result in lots of portable tellies. But it does mean another possible carriage contract for radio and TV broadcasters. The mobile companies really are beginning to call the shots.
And talking about mobile phones, they’re all getting more Nano-like: consumer phones are getting slimmer and becoming much more music-focused. I played with a Sony (above), which had a motion-detector in it (if you shake your phone in a certain way, it shuffles the songs), and a Samsung (below), which had a pull/drag type interface similar to an iPod. Notable was how full the music experience was on the screen; and how comparatively empty the screen on the FM experience was. The Sony had RDS (it couldn’t pick anything up), and the Samsung didn’t even have that. As radio broadcasters, we have to use this screen in a rather better way. (If the mobile networks let us, of course).
