By Iris Hong

 

Beijing. August 27. INTERFAX-CHINA - Members of China's Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting (CMMB) Workgroup said last Friday that progress is being made towards the commercialization of CMMB, a mobile TV standard backed by China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), and that near-commercial products have already been developed.

 

"We recently launched the TX101, a single-chip modulator based on CMMB that can support both single-frequency networks and multi-frequency networks. It is ready for commercial deployment now," Meng Fei, an assistant to the CEO of Beijing-based Innofidei Inc., a CMMB Workgroup member, said at the China Digital Media Summit (CDMS) in Beijing.

 

"Beijing BBEF Electronics Group has already supplied equipment that utilizes our TX101 solution to the China Central Television (CCTV) Tower in Beijing, and the tower is transmitting CMMB signals," Meng added.

 

CMMB was developed by SARFT's Academy of Broadcasting Science, and became a homegrown industrial standard for mobile TV services in China last October. SARFT is advocating the adoption of CMMB as China's main mobile TV technology, and plans for CMMB to be used to broadcast coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games to portable devices such as mobile phones, MP4 players, digital cameras and laptop computers.

 

In March of this year, Innofidei launched the first mobile TV chip based on CMMB technology, a development that is considered to be a crucial step in the commercialization of the standard. Innofidei has applied for 24 patents in China that relate to the mobile TV chip.

 

Meng said that Innofidei has supplied the mobile TV chip to 35 companies, including the handset manufacturers Lenovo, ZTE and Samsung. Such companies are currently developing terminal products that support CMMB, and Lenovo and ZTE have already launched prototype handsets based on Innofidei's mobile TV chip, according to officials from the two companies.

 

SARFT has set up a trial CMMB network in Beijing, the main host city of the 2008 Olympics, and the CCTV Tower, which contains CCTV's broadcasting equipment, is currently transmitting CMMB signals.

 

At the Beijing International Radio, TV and Film Equipment Exhibition, an exhibition which was held concurrently with CDMS in Beijing, staff from the CMMB Workgroup demonstrated TV programs broadcast with CMMB technology being received on a laptop computer and a Lenovo mobile handset. A CMMB-based USB receiver developed by Innofidei was used in the demonstration, and allowed the laptop to receive TV programs that were broadcast.

 

"At present, only the CCTV-1 channel is being delivered through CMMB. During the Olympic Games next year though, 25 channels will be delivered through CMMB," a CMMB Workgroup staff member told Interfax.

 

Beijing-based Neonetech, another member of the CMMB Workgroup, has developed a TV tuner based on CMMB technology that comes in the form of a SD (secure digital) card. The device can be inserted into a mobile handset's SD card slot to enable the device to receive digital TV. A sample of the device was on display at the exhibition, but a commercial version is still not yet available.

 

"By using this SD card TV tuner, users can enjoy mobile TV without having to replace their mobile phones," Meng noted.

 

Although the schedule to provide CMMB for the Olympic Games is quite tight, SARFT remains confident.

 

"CMMB trials in six Olympic host cities will be completed by the end of this year. A satellite for the CMMB system will be launched during the first half of next year and CMMB mobile TV services will be launched before the Olympic Games in August," Yang Qinghua, the director of the Television Institute of SARFT's Academy of Broadcasting Science, said at CDMS.

 

The CMMB system uses both satellites and ground transponders to transmit CMMB signals. Ground transponders for the system are to be deployed in urban areas and in tunnels where satellite signals are weak.

 

In addition to CMMB, there are a number of other mobile TV standards being developed in China, namely Nufront Software's T-MMB, Tsinghua University's DMB-TH and Huawei's CMB.

 

There are also three major foreign broadcasting mobile TV standards available on the market, South Korea's T-DMB (terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting), Europe's DVB-H (digital video broadcasting for handhelds) and Qualcomm's MediaFLO.