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DVB-H

10.1 Mobile Television

Watching television on handheld devices has caught the imagination of many in the industry. As the name suggests, mobile TV is all about transferring multimedia content to handheld devices or in simpler terms television on a mobile device (as shown in Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1 Television on a handheld device.

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Some technologies that are being used in this space are ISDB-T, DMB, Media FLO and DVB-H. ISDB-T stands for Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting and is a terrestrial television standard. It has been developed in Japan and 1/13 of the DTV networks have been allocated for broadcasting towards handheld devices. DMBs or the Digital Media Broadcasts use the Eureka-147 DAB standard for transmitting to handheld devices. MediaFLO has been developed by Qualcomm and is a proprietary system that uses OFDM for transmitting to the handheld devices. Another technology is MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service) which is based on the3GPP release 6 and uses the EDGE/UMTS infrastructure. Let's have a brief look at some of the technologies used in Mobile TV.

10.1.1 Bearer Technologies for Handheld TV

Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB)

This was initially developed for digital audio but can now encompass the whole range of multimedia, including audio broadcasting services (video, audio, data, text, etc.). Though there are many DAB technology variants, ...

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