Стюарт О'Брайен размышляет на тему вавилонского разнообразия стандартов мобильного ТВ. Станет ли BCAST Enabler панацеей?

"Mobile TV: Teacher, mother, secret lover

Homer Simpson once exclaimed that television was his "teacher, mother, secret lover!", accurately summing up how most of us couch potato types feel about the goggle box.

As a medium, TV has had an effect like no other on cultures the world over since its first blurry images began illuminating living rooms in the 1930s.

But oddly for such a mass-market piece of consumer electronics, the TV landscape is also massively fragmented. From its earliest days, individual countries and regions have seen fit to set their own standards for how pictures should be beamed through the airwaves and displayed on TV sets.

NTSC, PAL and SECAM are three of the broadcast standards from the analogue days. In the digital world there are even more: DVB, ATSC, ISDB and all their variations for terrestrial and satellite platforms.

Unfortunately, this fragmentation has been transferred into the broadcast mobile TV market, except that here it is happening within countries/regions and not just between them. This is despite the efforts of cross-border bodies like the EU to mandate a common platform.

Standards already jostling for position are DVB-H, DVB-SH, DMB, DAB-IP, ISDB and MediaFLO. This week the ATSC, which sets standards for DTV in North America, threw its hat into the ring when it began assessing proposals for its own mobile broadcast specifications.

Fragmentation is already a huge headache for vast swathes of the mobile content space and millions of dollars have been invested collectively to tackle the problem, especially in sectors such as games.

Will broadcasters be willing to go through the same process in order that their services and programming work across the gamut of mobile TV technology platforms out there? We're about to find out.

Certainly the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is eyeing the simplification of content deployment for broadcast mobile TV - its ongoing work on the BCAST Enabler specification is designed to create a 'write once, run anywhere' environment' for broadcasters and other content providers across the various broadcast mobile TV platforms (and network-based 3G streaming).

The spec - if widely adopted - could also have significant implications for the concept of mobile TV 'roaming'.

The downside? Gathering consensus across any industry is time-consuming, as the OMA knows only too well from its experiences trying to set common standards for mobile digital rights management.

We wish them luck".