In a press release this past Monday, mobile platform and solutions developer Qualcomm has announced the demonstration of a new type of mobile tv transceiver that could be implemented in markets where free to air televison access could be combined with premium services.
The Universal Broadcast Modem consists of both a MediaFLO tuner for access to the MediaFLO service and an ISDB-T (International Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial) tuner, a relatively new standard which has seen wild popularity in Japan (where it is branded as 1seg) on new handsets from service providers such as NTT DoCoMo, KDDI au, and SoftBank Mobile, and is currently the forthcoming digital television standard in Brazil.
The intention behind this development is to offer handset manufacturers and carriers options in terms of offering a choice of free-to-air mobile television access and premium access services utilizing the MediaFLO standard in combination with ISDB-T or DVB-H access while integrating the UBM chipset with its lineup of CDMA2000/W-CDMA MSM chipsets for handsets and modems in an effort to reduce cost and complexity.
MediaFLO is currently the only mobile television standard available in the US and currently suffers from limited availability and coverage, increased handset cost and complexity, and limited carrier choice as AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless are the only major providers of the service.
