17th June,2004

Japan Broadcasting Corp (Nippon Hoso Kyokai - NHK) and five private-sector broadcasters are likely to finally start services of terrestrial digital broadcasting for cellular phones in fiscal 2005.

This is due to the fact that they reached an agreement with MPEG LA, LLC, a US organization managing MPEG-related patent licensing, over the licensing fee payments for H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC)-video coding.

Broadcasters, cellular phone makers and parts makers are gearing up for new service-related devices because the introduction is likely to be the autumn of 2005.

Under the agreement, the broadcasters will pay the group a one-time fee of US$2,500 for each encoder purchased for free broadcasting. This result suggests broadcasters have extracted a fairly substantial concession from MPEG LA.

Initially, broadcasters planned to adopt MPEG-4 Visual. However, MPEG LA demanded payments of a maximum US$1 million annually as a patent license fee for using this format, according to some participants. Broadcasters strongly opposed the MPEG LA request, and this caused a delay in the launch of mobile-segment digital terrestrial broadcasting, which was to start in December 2003. Even with the H.264 system that emerged as a substitute of MPEG-4 Visual, MPEG LA demanded up to US$10,000 in payments annually for each broadcaster, when the firm made the announcement of a patent license fee in November 2003.

The latest agreement resulted in a sharp reduction in fee payments, and affirmed the fee to be paid just once. The initial MPEG LA's plan has completely changed.

"We have repeatedly insisted that collecting a patent license fee based on the audience does not seem appropriate for non-chargeable broadcasting such as terrestrial digital broadcasting. MPEG LA finally understood that," said Hideki Maekawa, an executive officer of Tokyo Broadcasting System Inc. According to Maekawa, this agreement has fully met the broadcasters' expectations.

Broadcasters have started getting ready for setting operational rules, which describes details of data broadcasting, and making decision on Rights Management and Protection (RMP) immediately after the agreement. According to the broadcasters' estimate, "it will take about a year and half from setting specifications to realization of a device."

Thus, they reportedly have set their schedule to finish most of the work related to setting specifications in May 2004 in order to start providing services in fiscal 2005.

The biggest issue involving specifications is to arrange interests between broadcasters and cellular phone carriers. They had discussed specifications in 2002, which ended without a conclusion.

However, the situation has changed in the past two years. Broadcasters supported Quarter VGA (QVGA, 320 x 240 pixels) while cellular phone carriers supported Quarter Common Intermediate Format (QCIF, 176 x 144 pixels) in 2002. Now some cellular phones have QVGA displays. Indeed, time has solved a rift between them.

Another item of disharmony is where to set a "happy medium" in levels of activity a mobile phone user watching broadcast content is allowed during broadcast. Broadcasters are seeking a point of compromise.

When the user watches a program on a mobile phone, there will be two types of content on the mobile phone screen -- a broadcast program (such as a drama) by a broadcast service provider, and custom data relevant to the program (such as online shopping information as to the shoes an actor in the drama is wearing) prepared by a telecom carrier.

In 2002, broadcasters supported an idea of displaying a restricted type of content so as to avoid the user's attention being diverted from the program. They are now likely to seek a screen to be able to display both contents as long as they can be distinguished from each other.

On the issue of whether to employ RMP, there are differing opinions in the broadcasting industry. According to some, there is no use of scrambling for copy control because this type of broadcasting provides low resolution-images at 15 frames per second on QVGA.

Development of tuner modules and H.264 encoders that are to be embedded in cellular phones is accelerating. For example, makers are developing tuner modules at a power-consumption level of around 100mW, measuring 1.4mm in thickness, while a current standard model has 150mW-200mW power consumption and measures around 2mm in thickness.

While the schedule for starting broadcast services for mobile devices is not undecided, development of a tuner module did not go beyond a trial phase. However, the latest agreement is expected to help push makers forward to develop downsized products for commercial use.

For a substrate, most units use a printed wiring board to embed an LSI. Instead of using the printed wiring board, makers will be able to switch to low-temperature co-fired ceramics that can reduce the thickness of a substrate from 2mm to 1.4mm.

As for H.264, cell phone makers have started evaluations by measuring power consumption and microprocessor performance using an H.264 decoder on an evaluation board with field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology.

Techno Mathematical Co, Ltd leads in developing H.264 decoders. Already, the firm has developed the software decoder. It has reportedly received inquiries and evaluation requests from six cellular phone makers.

For developing the software codec for H.264, Techno Mathematical tried to exclude multiplication and division as much as possible through factorization, and used digital media new algorism (DMNA) in order to reduce floating-point arithmetic. The firm reportedly simplifies calculation for motion estimation, arithmetic coding and deblocking filters by using this algorism. It can decrease the size of program to 50KB.