HOUSTON-Crown Castle Mobile Media will use technology from Microsoft Corp. to deliver and manage content for its live mobile TV service, the companies announced yesterday.
The subsidiary of Crown Castle International Corp. said it has selected Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Video 9 and Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10 for its broadcast service, which will use Digital Video Broadcasting for Handheld (DVB-H) technology. The company also announced several other vendors for the service. Thales Broadcast & Multimedia and Axcera were chosen to provide terrestrial site transmitter equipment and integration; Kathrein Inc. will build site antennas; and SES Americom will provide satellite space segment for broadcast distribution.
Crown Castle will build and operate the proposed network, which will use 5 megahertz of unencumbered nationwide spectrum in the 1.6 GHz band. It is expected to compete directly against another proposed network dedicated to wireless multimedia services built by Qualcomm subsidiary MediaFlo USA.
The two networks will likely “change the competitive dynamics of the marketplace” when they come online next year, according to a forecast from IDC released Monday. The report predicts more than 30 million U.S. wireless subscribers will pay to watch video content on their phones by 2009.
“With an ARPU approaching $10 per subscriber per month by that point, commercial video and television may well emerge as the single-largest cell-phone-oriented ARPU driver among consumers outside of voice,” said Lewis Ward, an IDC senior research analyst.
