Mobile TV in Russia emits a weak signal

A week ago, two cellular operators, SkyLink CJSC and SMARTS CJSC , began trial operation of the Mobile TV service, Prime-TASS reported in a review article about the prospects for developing mobile TV in Russia. The television signal will be broadcast on GPRS-technology.

Among the major operators in Russia, VimpelCom does not provide mobile TV services only - the company has its own reasons for this. The remaining members of the “Big Three” - OJSC “MegaFon” and OJSC “Mobile TeleSystems” - are already broadcasting TV programs to their phones. And the first such service was offered in 2004 by the company “Dream Interpretation”, the “daughter” of “MegaFon”. “In essence, this is a mobile version of Internet TV,” the company's employees said in an interview with Prime Tass. - Initially, the TV signal is converted into mobile video formats RealMedia and 3GP. And the transfer of information in these formats to the subscriber’s phone takes place via GPRS / EDGE networks. ”

Experts believe, however, that the services available from domestic cellular companies can only be called mobile TV conditionally. Broadcasting requires a separate technology — such as DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld), for example. It is the most popular standard tested in Europe. Its peculiarity is that the TV signal transmission is carried out using special transmitters that leave the resources of cellular networks unoccupied. DVB-H networks are tested in Finland, England, France, Italy, Germany.
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In Russia, DVB-H technology has also begun to take the first steps. Digital TV and Radio Broadcasting (DTV), a subsidiary of Sistema Mass Media, a subsidiary of Sistema, this spring announced plans to build a network on the DVB-H standard. Moreover, DTV announced the beginning of the test operation of the system for transmitting signals to phones in this standard. The operation will last until the end of 2006, after which the mobile TV service will begin to spread commercially. It is expected that subscribers will pay $ 5-15 per month for transmissions of national channels and products of Sistema Mass Media. By 2010, DTV is counting on 500,000 mobile TV subscribers in Moscow alone.

It is possible that VimpelCom will be included in the mobile TV industry when the DVB-H standard is finally “run-in”. According to the company, the transmission of the signal via GPRS, currently available to operators, is nothing more than a marketing ploy, but there is no real technical component that can provide subscribers with good quality of television signal reception in 2G networks (and even 2.5G).

However, MegaFon also admits that “according to the results of two years of work in Moscow, mobile TV is more an image service than“ killer-aplimation ”.”

“For better reception, 3G networks are needed,” says Boris Ovchinnikov, head of research at J'son & Partners , “but so far even a competition for licenses for third-generation networks has not been announced, and the networks themselves will obviously not be before 2008.”

His words echo the opinion of Mobile Research Group analyst Eldar Murtazin: “I strongly doubt that Russia will become one of the first countries where mobile TV will appear. Even simple additional services are not very common with us, what to say about such complex ones as mobile television. "