Samsung to bring DMB TV on the move to Europe
Yesterday, along with several other journalists, I had a fairly lengthy chat with David Steel, VP of Marketing for Samsung and one of the highest ranked non-Koreans in the company. He revealed that the big story for Samsung at this year’s IFA show is to be a wide range of mobile TV products.
Steel says that ‘while much of the emphasis on TV on the move has been focused on mobile phones at IFA we will display a range of devices that can access TV including camcorders, personal DVD players, personal media players and camcorders.’
The devices will tune into TV via the DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) format a variation of DAB the digital radio standard that has been very successful in the UK and Germany.
The first DMB products are likely to be available in Germany next year for the footy World Cup, though a UK launch won’t be too far behind.
Quite who will offer digital TV services to these kind of devices remains to be seen. As Steel points out the obvious candidates are those who already offer digital radio stations – so maybe the BBC and the EMAP group which has several music TV channels. Sky is almost certainly looking at the format too as are news channels like ITV and CNN.
Digital TV to small devices is already available in both Japan and Korea.
You can read about the Japanese experience, which uses satellite rather than terrestrial signals, here.
Nokia, along with several partners are currently trialling a rival system DVB-H
