Digital Broadcasters | CASBAA | Mobile TV Group To Lead Or Be Lead

Digital Broadcasters Vendor News Asia views the formation of a CASBAA Mobile TV Group to focus on the deployment of Mobile TV across Asia Pacific as admirable.

What is so surprising then is that the CASBAA Mobile TV Group appears to be formed late in the day, showing a reactionary stance not one of industry leadership. This still reflects the tardiness of the core CASBAA group the "broadcasters" to face new technologies head on.

I say this in the knowledge that Mobile TV has been the hot topic along with IPTV applications since mid-2005 and throughout 2006.

Mobile TV represents one of the biggest potential revenue streams for the traditional broadcasters (as program/content providers).

So why wasn't the CASBAA Mobile Group started earlier? The group by the way, comprises Turner Broadcasting, ESPN Star Sports, CNBC Asia, BBC World, STAR Group, Walt Disney Television International and Sony Pictures TV International, as well as platform operator PCCW, handset manufacturer Nokia and chipset supplier Sun Microsystems.

Following its Group's formation, it met with the DVB-H Asia Pacific Alliance (DAPA), which comprises DVB-H dedicated broadcast platform operators such as Bridge Networks of Australia, MiTV of Malaysia and MECA from Indonesia, as well as Nokia at the CASBAA 2006 get together late last month.

It seems CASBAA had to learn from a meeting earlier in the year first, from the Asia Mobile Initiative (AMI), where video-to-mobile streaming information was exchanged with roaming platforms M1- Vodafone (Singapore), Celcom (Malaysia), DTAC (Thailand) and SMART (Philippines) before taking the project forward.

It is getting on for six months since the "Change or Die" speech on June 20 by Jeffrey Soong, of Hong Kong-based, Broadband Network Systems at the CommunicAsia 2006 conference. Soong 's reality check was to change the established industry mind set to handle today's Entertainment World which puts the proposition that the consumers want 24/7 access whenever and wherever they want. Entertainment comes to them and not the other way around.

Digital Broadcasters vendor news suggests that Mobile TV is a key part of that mix.

Six months could represent a lot of lost revenue.