A group of broadcasters today announced plans to form a joint venture
to develop a
new national mobile content service. They will use existing broadcast
spectrum, to provide content to
mobile devices, including live and on-demand video, local and national
news from print and electronic sources, as well as sports and
entertainment programming.
Broadcast spectrum to
be utilized for the new mobile service will come from the three
owned-and-operated station groups -- Fox, NBC & Telemundo, and ION
-- and the nine local broadcast groups, which are Belo, Cox, E.W. Scripps, Gannett, Hearst, Media General,
Meredith, Post Newsweek and Raycom. Separately, these nine local
broadcast companies formed Pearl Mobile DTV Company LLC as a vehicle for
their involvement in the venture.
By aggregating existing
broadcast spectrum from its launch partners, the new venture will have
the capacity to offer a breadth of mobile video and print content to
nearly 150 million U.S. residents. In addition to broadcast spectrum,
the partners will commit content, marketing resources and capital to the
new venture. The service will employ ATSC-M/H, an open broadcast
transmission system developed by the Advanced Television Systems
Committee (ATSC) specifically for mobile devices.
The venture is designed
to complement the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) National
Broadband Initiative by giving consumers mobile access to video content
while reducing congestion of the nation's wireless broadband
infrastructure. In addition, the service's mobile content network will
have the capacity to deliver local and national time-sensitive emergency
information to citizens across the U.S.