Bonus for terrestrial digital broadcast winners: regulator
Play
The National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission is planning to give away a mobile digital TV broadcasting licence to all winners of commercial terrestrial digital TV broadcasting licences.
“Our concept is free basis. Mobile users can watch free-to-air digital TV programmes via compatible handheld devices,” Natee Sukonrat, chairman of the NBTC’s broadcasting committee, said last week.
The watchdog is expected to auction the commercial terrestrial digital TV licences in the third quarter of this year.
The mobile licence is for digital TV service providers to air the same free-to-air TV programmes on their channels to tablet computers and smartphones with the 1.3.1 or 1.2.1 digital TV receiver standard.
But the success of mobile digital TV in Thailand will depend on people’s behaviour and the supporting devices, he added.
Takayuki Nagai, senior manager for digital TV at NEC, said if there is demand in Thailand for mobile digital TV devices, NEC would try to produce them for the Thai market, pending Thailand’s regulations.
NEC claims that it is the second-ranked digital TV equipment supplier in the world with a market share of about 30 per cent. It offers products using the Japanese standard – Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) – and the European standard – Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVBT).
NEC has launched many ISDB-compatible mobile TV handheld devices in the Japanese market.
Shinichiro Tonooka , senior manager for corporate strategy at mmbi Inc, the operator of the NOTTV mobile TV service in Japan, said NOTTV launched the service last April and now has 600,000 subscribers .
The company plans to spend US$500 million to cover 90 per cent of the Japanese population, up from 77 per cent currently.
“We expect to reach 6 million subscribers in 2016 after finishing the coverage plan and also hope to recoup our investment,” he said.
NOTTV charges a basic fee of Y420 (Bt130) per month for three channels with high quality, real-time service plus storage type services for digital contents of games, applications and magazines. If subscribers want to watch more premium content, they have to pay an additional fee.
NOTTV uses ISDB, while Thailand has adopted the DVBT2 European standard for terrestrial digital TV broadcasting.
“We have four key factors for expanding the business starting from good programmes and contents and affordable fees to cost-efficient service area coverage and the spread of devices from many key Japanese manufacturers,” he said.
