Hiwire, MediaFLO: head to head in Vegas

While Qualcomm Inc.’s MediaFLO and Crown Castle International Corp.’s Modeo L.L.C. service have been taking up most of the ink on mobile broadcast TV, Hiwire L.L.C. has been working behind the scenes to build out its network based on the DVB-H standard.
The company says it’s now 24 months away from a nationwide buildout that will bring it a total of 181 million potential consumers covered throughout the country, although it doesn’t anticipate nearly that many mobile broadcast television viewers anytime soon.
In April, Hiwire expects to begin consumer trials of its service in Las Vegas, the same market MediaFLO picked for its initial launch. Not only does the choice of Las Vegas offer the perfect opportunity for wireless carriers to compare its service with MediaFLO’s, it represents an accurate snapshot of the American landscape in terms of demographics, said Scott Wills, president and COO of Hiwire. Furthermore, it’s a market where traditional television broadcasters have already cleared the 700 MHz spectrum Hiwire uses for its service.
Aloha Partners, the parent company of Hiwire, owns the largest amount of 700 MHz spectrum in the United States, a spectrum originally allocated for television broadcasting. “The signal travels much faster than any other spectrum, secondly it propagates further than any other spectrum,” Wills said, adding that it can penetrate through two building walls. And because Hiwire owns twice as much bandwidth as MediaFLO in the 700 MHz spectrum, Wills said it will match MediaFLO’s quality and double the channel offering. Another DVB-H provider, Modeo, is testing its service in New York, and has tested it in Pittsburgh, as well as demonstrating the service at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month.
Aloha Partners spent all of 2005 as part of a lobbying effort to clear the 700 MHz spectrum, which culminated in legislation passed early last year that requires all TV stations to clear the spectrum nationwide by early 2009. It’s no coincidence that Hiwire will be ready to fully realize the potential of its mobile broadcast TV network nationwide once that occurs, Wills said.
But Hiwire isn’t simply waiting for the fruits of that legislation. T-Mobile USA Inc. has already agreed to have its employees and a group of select customers test the service in Las Vegas and other carriers are still in discussion, according to Wills.
Once it’s proven that there’s a large market for mobile TV, there will ample space for multiple providers and less talk about exclusive agreements with carriers, Wills said.
“We’re in the business of delivering entertainment to portable devices. The wireless carriers have interest in that and the cable operators have interest in that,” he said. “Our main competitor is lack of understanding as to what size this business is going to be.”
The mobile TV space is heading for major changes. “At this point in time, we’re rooting as much for MediaFLO as we are for ourselves because what we need to do is build the category,” he said.
“In the United States today 100 percent of the revenues are unicast, so I think we’re going to see that change quite a bit. They are losing money on delivering quality video. Unicast networks can’t support it,” he said.
While the jury is still out on how popular mobile broadcast television will be, Wills said even moderate traction in the U.S. market, say 20 percent of the total market, would produce large numbers.