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tb1
yalanand
@Junko, i totally agree wth you. I think people will watch digital TV broadcase ...
Newport Media gets the ISDB picture in smartphones
Peter Clarke
6/29/2012 3:18 AM EDT
LONDON – Fabless chip company Newport Media Inc. (Lake Forest, Calif.) has won design slots for its digital television receiver SoCs in smartphones and feature phones from Samsung, HTC, LG, Motorola and ZTE. The chips are specifically for reception of Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial (ISDB) transmissions which are standard in Latin American and Japanese markets.
Handset models available in Latin America include the Motorola EX139, LG X350 and the Samsung Galaxy YTV S5357 Android Smartphone. In Japan, network operators have selected several digital TV enabled Android Smartphones including the SC-06D Galaxy III from Samsung chosen by NTT Docomo, the ISW13HT from HTC chosen by KDDI and the 009Z from ZTE chosen by Softbank.
Newport Media provides products that integrate RF TV tuner, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), and analog demodulation into a single die. Several ISDB-T chips from Newport Media also include hardware based H.264 audio/video decoding functionality.
"Newport Media offers a comprehensive portfolio of embedded software solutions tailored for both the Japanese and Latin American ISDB-T markets," said Mohy Abdelgany, president and chief executive officer for Newport Media. "These software solutions combined with wide variety of best in class SoC solutions from Newport Media have been a major contributing factor to our success with these new handsets being announced today, and are prime examples of the capabilities we bring to the table."
Newport Media has recently achieved cumulative shipments of more than 30 million CMOS SoCs that address the global market for ISDB-T standard broadcast mobile TV.
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www.nmisemi.com
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eewiz
6/29/2012 4:36 AM EDT
I am wondering whether digital TV will ever be popular in mobile devices? IMO, with increasing 3G/4G dataspeeds people would prefer on-demand streaming video than broadcast tv. Ofcourse Japan is an exception, since they had mobile TV long before the data revolution started! Comments?
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junko.yoshida
6/29/2012 6:06 AM EDT
eewiz, you do have a point...people may prefer cherry-picking what they want to watch online.
But as long as digital TV broadcast is provided for free of charge/subscription (that's the case in Japan), I believe there is a demand for it on the market. China already proved it with the previous analog TV on handsets.
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yalanand
7/2/2012 7:20 AM EDT
@Junko, i totally agree wth you. I think people will watch digital TV broadcase if the content is free because telecom providers charge heavy fees for 3G/4G subscriptions.
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Frank Eory
6/29/2012 5:56 PM EDT
ISDB-T started in Japan, but the big market for these DTV-enabled smartphones is probably Brazil. Over-the-air broadcast TV is still the primary means of watching TV for millions of Brazilians, many of whom would probably rather not pay for data charges to watch TV on their phone if they can do it for free.
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tb1
7/2/2012 3:51 PM EDT
The US also has a mobile over-the-air standard not people know about:
Mobile Digital Television or Mobile DTV. It is more advanced than the home digital television: it uses MPEG-4, works with moving receivers, and had graceful degradation when the signal quality goes down. There are even stations in various cities who are broadcasting it!
But there are not many products in the US that have embraced this standard. I'd love to have a phone that had a Mobile DTV receiver built-in.
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