If you’ve wondered what happened to the digital mobile TV market in the Philippines, it’s basically back to the drawing board. In April 2010, Smart MyTV service was suspended indefinitely, three years after it launched and operated without earning a dime.
In June 11, 2010, the National Telecommunications Commission officially adopted the ISDB-T standard and effectively crippling DVB-H which was used by Smart MyTV. DVB-H was only working on the Nokia N92 and Nokia N77 back then.
Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting – Terrestrial (ISDB-T) is the most advanced international standard on digital terrestrial television broadcasting format originally developed in Japan. Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting (DTTB) services using ISDB-T started in Japan in December 2003 and in Brazil in December 2007. {via}
ISDB-T is able to broadcast HDTV and “One-seg” programs simultaneously. “One-Seg” is the name of a broadcasting service for handheld receivers such as cellular phones.
According to a commenter, Kyle Florentino, who alerted us of the changes:
1seg uses unused segments of an ISDB-T UHF transmitter. A Digital UHF transmitter is divided to 13 segments — 12 segments for an HD channel or for 4 SD channels leaving 1 segment. The best thing about 1seg is that channels are free, no need for a separate transmitter (unlike DVB-H), plus stronger coverage area.
Sad thing is, there are no 1seg phones available yet in the Philippines unless you buy 1seg phones or the PSP 1seg tuner from Japan.
There are 2 1seg channels for now — GEM HD and NBN. ABS-CBN will launch hopefully by this month.
Looks like we’re back to square one.
Note: NTC didn’t really dropped DVB-H because it wasn’t supported in the first place. Smart just went ahead to using it for MyTV and was lobbying for NTC to officially adopt it. Unfortunately for Smart, NTC went another way.wasn’t
for isdb-t stb and antenna posted on my facebook/mar valencia/twitter/oploks01