[Satellite Today – 6-23-08] Alcatel-Lucent has announced a deal which should boost its plan to derive revenues from the Asian mobile TV market, linking up with SpeedCast Ltd. to jointly market, deploy and operate a shared, hosted DVB-H (digital video broadcast–handheld) platform for mobile TV operators in Asia, Alcatel-Lucent announced June 20.
    The objective of the collaboration is to enable seamless delivery of digital video content to operators for transmission to devices supporting the DVB-H mobile TV standard. This hosted service, jointly operated by Alcatel-Lucent and SpeedCast, will enable mobile TV service providers to deliver more than 20 TV channels via satellite to transmission towers for terrestrial broadcast to DVB-H handheld devices.
    “For cost-conscious mobile TV service operators, the key advantage of adopting a hosted approach is to avoid having to invest in head-end infrastructure, and therefore be able to concentrate their infrastructure investment on gradually increasing the density of their DVB-H or DVB-SH terrestrial transmission networks,” Frederic Rose, Alcatel-Lucent’s president of activities in the Europe, Africa and Asia region, said in a statement. “By teaming-up with SpeedCast, Alcatel-Lucent is committed to allowing traditional as well as green-field operators accelerate their mobile TV delivery anywhere in Asia.”