Samsung, LG to Push Single Mobile Digital TV Format in US

Frustrated with the gridlock in the U.S. mobile digital TV market, where several formats are competing and none has become dominant, South Korea's two largest consumer electronics agreed on Wednesday to ditch their proprietary standards and work together on a single format.

Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics had both previously been promoting their own standards, but the new deal will see engineers from the two companies work on a unified standard for submission to the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC). The new format will take elements from Samsung's AVSB and LG's MPH systems and development should be completed this year.

In several markets around the world mobile digital TV has already taken off and proved extremely popular with consumers. South Korea's DMB system has roughly 11 million [m] users and in neighboring Japan more than 25 million [m] cell phones have been sold that can receive the domestic OneSeg system. Trial and early-stage commercial systems are also up and running in some other parts of Asia and Europe but in the U.S. the market remains stalled due to competing formats and business models.

AT&T launched a service based on Qualcomm's MediaFLO technology at the beginning of this month that delivers a handful of channels produced by broadcast and cable networks for between US$13 and $30 per month. Verizon offers a similar service based on the same technology.

But both services don't deliver local, over-the-air television, something that has proved to be the killer app of mobile digital TV in other countries. A pay service operating in South Korea and Japan has been racking up losses because users apparently prefer to get their local TV stations at no-cost rather than paying for content.

For local TV stations there's several formats to chose from, including the Samsung and LG systems, Europe's DVB-H and the South Korean T-DMB format.

Samsung and LG could be well placed the break the status-quo. As cellular handset makers it would be relatively easy for them to produce handsets to support the formats in question and there's an advantage for TV stations in using their new format: It will broadcast alongside the station's HDTV signal and doesn't require the TV station to buy additional broadcast spectrum.

Precise details of the Samsung and LG technology have not yet been determined.