Crown Castle, which owns over 10,000 wireless towers and holds a nationwide spectrum license, announced certain key equipment and services suppliers for its forthcoming mobile TV service based on the Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld (DVB-H) standard.
- Thales Broadcast & Multimedia and Axcera are providing terrestrial site transmitter equipment and integration services.
- Kathrein Inc. is providing site antennas.
- SES AMERICOM is providing satellite space segment for broadcast distribution.
- The service will use Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Video 9 and Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) 10 encoding technology.
Crown Castle Mobile Media expects to begin commercial deployment of its DVB-H service in select major US markets during 2005. http://www.crowncastle.com/
- In March 2005, Crown Castle announced that it is working with Samsung to accelerate digital television services to handset devices in the US market. Samsung plans to launch DVB-H handsets supporting both WCDMA/EVDO and GSM/GPRS networks. The company has demonstrated wireless phones with 2″ QVGA screens supporting 226k colors, up to 30 frames per second, and 300 kbps per channel speeds. The phones have MPE-FEC error correction implemented and use H.264 and AAC+ video/audio decoding technologies.
- Crown Castle and Nokia have also completed successful demonstration trials of DVB-H handsets.