On The Verge

The NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show going on through Thursday in Las Vegas has become so broad that you can probably find most any kind of story at the event. For instance, I spent much of the last two days talking to companies about interconnects for storage and compute-cluster applications in preparation for a print article slated for July. But ask me what was hot at the show, and my first response would be mobile video. Everyone seems to want a piece of the potentially huge video-to-handset market. See “Mobile video: Participants follow multiple paths” for background info.

The NAB mobile video activity centers around the DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld) standard that’s a follow on to the DVB-T (Terrestrial) standard that’s the basis for digital TV in Europe. Potentially, service providers – presumably the cellular carriers – will offer TV broadcasts via DVB-H. Crown Castle, the owner of many cellular towers, has been trialing DVB-H in the Pittsburg, PA area.

At NAB, Crown Castle along with a group of DVB-H proponents including Microsoft, Intel, Freescale, Nokia, and Texas Instruments issues a joint press release supporting the video technology. Moreover, the Microsoft booth featured a demo of live video being piped to a DVB-H-connected PDA. For the demo, Crown Castle deployed a satellite uplink from the Pittsburg trial and a downlink atop the Las Vegas Convention Center. From that downlink, the company added a DVB-H transmitter that in turn fed the PDA in the Microsoft booth.

The PDA was equipped with a DVB-H receiver built as a reference platform by DiBcom implemented in an SDIO (Secure Digital I/O) card. The design uses DiBcom’s DIB7000-H chip set and a tuner IC from Freescale. DiBcom has ported drivers for the design to Microsoft’s Windows CE platform. DiBcom is a long time player in the DVB-T market. Of course Texas Instruments has said that it is developing its Hollywood chip for DVB-H, Freescale has plans to offer a demodulator to mate with their tuner, and you can expect Intel in the market as well.

But not everyone is certain that an overlay network is the best way to move content to a handset. Motorola, for instance demonstrated a technology called iRadio that’s, primarily designed for audio but could serve up video as well. The iRadio technology requires the user to dock their handset each night and automatically load ten hours of fresh content on the device. The company claims the ten hours of audio will fit on a 256-Mbyte Flash card. The technology also adds real-time updates of sports scores and business news via the cellular link during the day.