Govt. to invite bids for mobile TV license

          Government has accepted the recommendations made by the telecom regulator to hold a bidding process for issuing licenses for offering mobile TV services. It has also been decided to allow operators to decide on the technology to be deployed for offering the service.

           Mobile TV will enable consumers get live TV channels on a handheld device. Service providers will be permitted to have foreign direct investments of up to 74 per cent.

      “The methodology for grant of license through closed tender system on the basis of one-time entry fee quoted by the bidders should be broadly based on the bidding process followed for licensing of private FM radio stations. However, the reserve entry fee for a particular license area should be 50 per cent of the highest financial bid submitted for the particular area,” stated a Government document.

        Licenses will be given State-wise and each player will get 8 Mhz spectrum in 585 Mhz and 806 Mhz frequency bands. The Government has also decided that Doordarshan, which is the only player to start mobile TV services, should be permitted to share infrastructure with private players on mutual agreement basis.

       “Wherever a mobile television service provider has installed its own infrastructure, it should be made available for sharing with other such service providers,” said the document.

        In addition to the entry fee, operators will have to pay annually 4 per cent of their revenues as license fee to the Government. While existing telecom operators with unified access license will not have to bid for a Mobile TV license, they will have to pay all the levies. The modalities of issuing the license will be worked out by the Information and Broadcasting whereas the spectrum will be made available by the Department of Telecom.

      Technically, there are two main ways of delivering television content to mobile devices. The television content could be provided via mobile telecommunications networks through 3G technologies or by using broadcasting platform such as Qualcomm's Media-Flo and Nokia's DVBH technologies.

       Currently, only Doordarshan has commercially launched the service on the DVBH platform. Telecom companies are also planning to foray into this segment owing to its huge revenue earning potential. However, broadcasting platform has an advantage when it comes to mobile TV services because the spectrum is dedicated only for transmitting TV channels. 3G technologies is used for voice, data and video and, therefore, operators may not be able to offer as many number of channels or quality as a Mobile TV player

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