Next week the global Mobile TV industry will watch Germany. Just in time for the FIFA Worldcup 2006 the startup called Mobiles Fernsehen Deutschland (MFD) will launch their new Mobile TV service Watcha on 31 May 2006.
MFD is financed by a couple of private investors including Dieter Ammer, CEO of the famous Tchibo Holding that already has an MVNO joint venture with O2 Germany. Henrik Rinnert, MFD’s CEO and Founder, used to be a lawyer and his background surely helped him write all the license applications he needed to become Germany’s undisputed Mobile TV pioneer.
MFD received nationwide licenses for an initial spectrum of 1,5 MHz from all regional media authorities in each of the 16 federal states. This is a big accomplishment as each federal state in Germany manages the broadcast spectrum on their own.
Watcha is based on T-DMB (Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) which is commercially available now as opposed to DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld) which will at least take another year before hitting the market. As I explained in my last post, South Korea has already 1 year of DMB experience and it is no wonder that the first T-DMB device in Germany will be provided by Samsung. Samsung’s first European TV phone is the SGH-P900 that supports T-DMB including DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) and GPRS. The device can record at least 10 minutes of TV content and it also features a 2 Megapixel camera and an mp3 player. Samsung’s next mobile devices will support UMTS, too.
MFD’s partners include T-Systems, responsible for putting up the DMB transmitters and running the broadcast network, Midray, subsidiary of the largest German Mobile Service Reseller debitel that operates the content and service platform, and Irdeto, provider of the Conditional Access System (CAS) to secure the TV content. Irdeto was a logical choice as they also secured the Mobile TV service of the Korean operator TU Media and implemented their chip-based CAS on 40 Korean mobile phones, in-car systems and other devices.
Watcha will offer 4 TV channels and 1 Radio channel. ZDF, one of the 2 leading Free TV stations in Germany, will be available on Watcha for free. This is pretty cool especially for the mobile football fans as ZDF will broadcast most of the Worldcup games. The 3 other video channels N24 (news), PRO7/SAT1 (entertainment) and MTV (music videos) will be included in the premium subscription that will cost around €10 per month. Watcha’s Mobile Pay TV service will also include the radio programme BigFM2see that will be enhanced with visual content.
Initially Watcha will be only distributed and marketed by debitel as the 4 German MNOs prefer to wait for DVB-H. However, T-DMB-powered Mobile TV is going to be the most important mobile innovation in Germany this year and I expect one or several of the German operators to jump on the DMB bandwagon as they don’t want to be left behind. MFD will get more attractive by the time more handsets will be available such as the UMTS T-DMB device from LG Electronics scheduled for July 2006.
Soon, Watcha will be enhanced with interactive capabilities that are highly attractive to users and advertisers. Imagine that every hour you get a datacast with offerings from a Mobile Music Shop from one of the usual suspects such as iTunes, Vodafone MusicDownloads or O2 Music. Advertisers will look forward to the future of a smart client application sitting on the Mobile TV device that will be able to track the exact content usage and interaction of those viewers that have given their permission.
Exciting times we enter and this is only the beginning of the Mobile TV Broadcast business that will be the more successful the better it integrates the power of the Mobile Internet and inexpensive mobile data plans.
