Ian McGarrity

Ian McGarrity, Director, IMW Media Services

My role in this session is really to go outside of Australia for a little while and to give you a quick update on what is happening with digital terrestrial television (DTTB) in the other parts of our region, the Asia Pacific. I wish to confirm that this presentation is about digital terrestrial television, not digital television per se.

A quick snapshot shows that there are four other countries apart from Australia that have begun digital terrestrial television in our region, those being Singapore, South Korea, India and Taiwan. Two other countries will begin digital terrestrial television later this year, that is, Japan and Vietnam. I think there are four or five more countries that are next in line: China, Malaysia, Thailand, New Zealand and Brunei. Interestingly enough, all the ones that have yet to start, with the exception I think of New Zealand and Brunei, have not actually chosen their transmission system, but one would expect that they will choose DVB. China is likely to choose a DVB variation for intellectual property royalty payment reasons.

Why is DTTB being introduced elsewhere? Well there are some fairly common reasons:

a. to introduce new services;

b. to extend the coverage of existing services, a particularly important reason in the less-developed countries, about which I would like to speak a little more in respect of India, China and Vietnam in particular;

c. to keep competitors out of the digital spectrum:

d. to compete better with trans-national broadcasters, which is a real issue for a lot of the countries, particularly the developing ones in the Asia Pacific;

e. to open up of new lines of revenue, particularly in regard to generating revenue from transmitter sites and towers (in India for instance), and diversifying into telecoms and ISP type activities.

I do not think this group of reasons is very different from that which applied in Australia. Now let me highlight some features of the countries one by one.

Singapore

In Singapore a mobile service began in 2000. It is in about 1500 to 2000 buses, and recently a local manufacturer there started producing set top boxes (STBs) and an aerial device to enable this service to be consumed in ordinary cars. It is not an economically viable service and it is really continues to exist because government organisations in particular can be "persuaded" to advertise on the mobile service. There have been trials for a fixed digital terrestrial television service in Singapore for some time, run by the Media Corporation of Singapore, but my feeling is that it is struggling to find a business case and the programming for this fixed service multiplex licence.

A possible reason for the slow DTTB start in Singapore is that it is a very heavily cabled country and a very large number of people have cable access to TV and/or other broadband services. It is a little difficult in such a multi-channel world to find something new to do with the fixed location DTTB service. Maybe the answer regarding what will happen with the rest of Singapore's planned DTTB capacity will be found through the current tender for a new pay TV service. Singapore Cable Vision lost its monopoly last year, and perhaps a pay competitor will use three or four multiplexes to deliver its product.

South Korea

In South Korea there are five multiplexes operating in Seoul now and one in Daegue. HDTV is involved in that country. Before the end of 2003, another five cities will have digital terrestrial broadcasting start. About 133,000 integrated digital television sets and set top boxes have been sold. You can see from the prices (and I have used the lowest ones that have been quoted to me) that their HDTV prices are US$400 for the set top box and US$1,500 for a 32-inch (80cm) IDTV (integrated digital TV set).

There has been some incipient pressure in South Korea for mobile services, but the US transmission system used there, ATSC is not suited to mobile services. Hence there is still some meandering around the backwaters as to whether Korea might even re-think their ATSC decision. My suspicion, however, is that such a course is unlikely, given that such a major company as LG has heavy interests in patents that are associated with the ATSC system.

India

Trials have been going on since March 2002 in four major cities. No STBs have been sold to the public and Doordashan (DDI) is the only terrestrial broadcaster. Its parent, Prasa Bharati, which is also the parent of All India Radio (AIR), owns all the terrestrial transmitter sites. Anybody who does operate digital terrestrial services in India has to operate through DDI and those transmitter sites.

I think it is important to remember that in India you have a whole host of regional languages and the people who speak those languages don't exclusively live in one area of the country. Therefore, digital terrestrial broadcasting will allow DDI to deliver regional language services to many areas where people who speak such languages are not in the majority.

Taiwan

Two multiplexes are operating in Taipei and I understand one multiplex is operating in most of the other seven coverage areas. By 2007 there will be five multiplexes in each of the seven coverage areas. Less than 5000 set top boxes have been sold and, like Singapore, Taiwan is very heavily cabled. 90 per cent of people get their free-to-air services through cable. One assumes that mobile services in the end will be a pretty important part of the business case for DDTB in that country.

Japan

Japan starts in December 2003 in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. There will be two NHK and six commercial program streams available at that time. Again, HDTV is involved. You may have heard some discussion here in Australia about dual tuner devices (that is, devices that have both a DDTB tuner and a satellite DVBS tuner in them). In Japan, the integrated digital television devices with dual tuners (DDTB and DVBS) are already on sale, and dual tuner STBs will go on sale in December 2003. I also understand that while Japan at the moment operates with the ARIB standard applications program interface (API) that there may be some movement towards ultimately adopting MHP.

Vietnam

I found the case of Vietnam fascinating when I did some work in Asia last year. I didn't expect that it would be starting digital terrestrial television, but one trigger for the development was that VTV, the government broadcaster, wanted to extend its VTV 2 and VTV 3 services out of Hanoi and into major provincial centres like Haiphong and Da Nang that currently get only get one VTV service. Here again was a use of digital terrestrial broadcasting to extend existing analog services. VTV was originally planning to start in 2003 but this deadline will not be met.

I thought it would be interesting for you to know that VTV starts off in a wonderful position: not only does it run the Pay TV service in Hanoi, but it also manufactures both the digital transmitters and its own STBs, in a thoroughly vertical market that stands in contrast to our horizontal one. Notwithstanding VTV being a bit slower than I first thought, there is a tender out in late 2003 from Hanel Broadcasting, a government related organisation, to start trial DTTB transmissions in Hanoi.

China

China is of course a significant market which every industry looks at. There are approximately 54,000 terrestrial television transmitter sites in China, so converting from analog will be a big job. While it is yet to make a decision on the system it will use there is, I understand, a DVB system operating in Shanghai now, and possibly another will be operating soon in Guangzhou. I mentioned the DVB royalty issue earlier, because it strikes me as interesting that the Chinese do not have to pay royalties for the use of DVB within China. However, everyone believes that China will eventually produce a variant of DVB, and the only reason I assume it would do that is for the export market. But, if it produces a variant of DVB, will there be an export market. I am not quite sure what is going on.

Hong Kong chose DVB but is waiting for the major China decision. Whatever happens, China will have DTTB before the Olympics.

Malaysia

In Malaysia the MCMC has recently released a major discussion paper which had to be answered by interested parties by the end of June. I suspect Malaysia will start DTTB in 2004/05.

Thailand

In Thailand I think there will be no movement until the new regulator is appointed (the NBC). Since speeches I have heard about this happening have been the same for the last two years, I am not sure quite when that will be.

New Zealand

New Zealand is an interesting case, because 30 per cent of TV homes there get digital television by satellite now. This presents quite a different situation to Australia. One wonders whether DTTB services in New Zealand will develop along similar lines as in Singapore and Taiwan and might focus on mobile services. The other thing I find interesting about New Zealand is that "re-transmission" of free-to-air television on satellite pay platforms (which is a big current issue here) has been resolved or partly resolved in New Zealand. TVNZ has its own satellite capacity and people can buy STBs to watch it alone. It and the other free-to-air services, 3, 4 and Prime are available on the Sky pay platform encrypted, so one has to get the Sky basic broadcast tier service in order to get them all together with EPG and Pay per View possibilities DTH.