City of Industry,
Calif. – The first market-ready Mobile DTV tuner for the car was shown by Concept
Enterprises, in a $499-suggested tuner due in early December.
A standard for
Mobile DTV was just
approved last month by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC)
allowing clean reception of live, local simulcast TV content in a car or to a
portable device.
Mobile DTV uses
the same digital spectrum as local TV stations for HD programming and can
stream it without ghosting or pixilation to a moving vehicle. It also comes
without monthly service fees.
The first
commercially ready Mobile DTV tuner was unveiled by Concept at the SEMA show
this month, although Kenwood has shown prototype models in the past.
Concept’s tuner
will work with any after-market or OEM monitor with RCA outputs. The tuner is
smaller than a Blackberry phone and requires a 1-inch roof-mount antenna base
with a 6-inch-long antenna wire.
In the past,
broadcast TV reception in the car has been limited. “Any time you moved over 20
miles per hour, the picture would break up and you’d get pixelation,” said
Concept national sales manager Al Miller, adding, “With the new LG ATSC M/H
chip, we can receive these signals.”
He added, “Especially
since AT&T CruiseCast is no longer, people are looking for an inexpensive
TV solution to get TV in the car. You get clean, clear reception of local
broadcasting.”
The ATSC Mobile
DTV standard allows broadcasters to use a portion of the existing 19.3Mbps DTV
channel capacity to transmit data with very robust characteristics suitable for
mobile, pedestrian and handheld products, said LG maker of the Mobile DTV
chips.
Broadcasters are
testing or airing the service in 29 markets, expected to grow to 70 by the end
of the year, according to Anne Schelle, executive director of Open
Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC), the trade group supporting Mobile DTV.
