21 May 2007

DVB-H commercial start in Finland

It’s the very well known fact about DVB-H standard and TV on our lovely smart phones.

We have equipment, we have phones capable to catch and show the DVB-H signal but they are useless as it is really hard to find the valid DVB-H signal. DVB-H is unfortunately still technology in testing and implementing process and coverage in most European countries (I really don’t know the situation in rest of the world) is poor and insufficient which makes these nice device not so popular among the power users.

Anyway, the good fact is that Nokia working hardly on populating this format of digital TV and Jukka from the S60 multimedia blog just reports that after several years of pilots and trials Finnish mobile TV is ready for prime time.

The actual DVB-H network operated by Digita (a subsidiary of French TDF group) has been available since December last year.

Only last week there was a significant milestone when the first commercial receiving device came available (that's Nokia N92) and both of the two national television broadcasters agreed to start programming on the network (MTV3 and Nelonen). The public broadcaster YLE is yet to start broadcasting due to some unclarified issues with the copyright compensations.

Although situation with DVB-H standard isn’t as brilliant as we would like to be I have some confirmation that DVB-H works just fine Italy and all big cities are covered at the moment. Just hope that we can expect same situation in rest of Europe soon and that all upcoming S60 phones will come with DVB-H chipset build in.