Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) and SpeedCast have announced plans to jointly market, deploy and operate a shared, hosted DVB-H platform for mobile TV operators in Asia. With this alliance, the companies aim to enable the seamless delivery of digital video content to operators for transmission to devices supporting the DVB-H mobile TV standard.

 

By leveraging their respective technologies, infrastructure and content delivery solutions, both companies will provide operators around the region with a state-of-the art DVB-H head-end. Jointly operated by Alcatel-Lucent and SpeedCast (News - Alert), this hosted service will enable mobile TV service providers to deliver more than 20 TV channels via satellite (in the Ku-band or in the C-band) to their transmission towers for terrestrial broadcast (in the UHF band) to DVB-H handheld devices.

 

Chief Executive Officer of SpeedCast, Pierre-Jean Beylier said in a statement that this hosted mobile TV broadcast offering will help reduce the risk to service providers associated with introducing a new service, while at the same time giving them the opportunity to provide their customers with attractively priced services and richer content offerings.

 

Frederic Rose, Alcatel-Lucent’s president of activities in the Europe, Africa and Asia region explained that for cost-conscious mobile TV service operators, the key advantage of adopting a hosted approach is to avoid having to invest in head-end infrastructure, and therefore be able to concentrate their infrastructure investment on gradually increasing the density of their DVB-H or DVB-SH terrestrial transmission networks. He noted that with this alliance, Alcatel-Lucent is expressing their commitment to allowing traditional as well as green-field operators to accelerate their mobile TV delivery anywhere in Asia.

 

This unique hosted DVB-H platform combines all the elements required for a successful mobile TV service including a service platform, security and encryption technology, the platform for encoding into a DVB-H compatible format, satellite delivery to terrestrial infrastructure and a number of TV channels with world-class content, which can be tailored for different ethnic audiences.