Nokia announced its latest Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H) broadcast mobile TV pilot with India’s national television broadcaster Doordarshan, using Nokia’s open standards based DVB-H solution.

The Nokia Mobile Broadcast Solution will be delivered to Doordarshan in early 2007.
During this pilot, Doordarshan will test the reception quality of the broadcast coverage, and explore the myriad of options of supporting different service schemes, such as advertising and interactive services. The pilot will also enable Doordarshan to gauge consumer expectations of the service going forward.

Mr L.D. Mandloi, Director-General of Doordarshan said: “Doordashan has taken a lead in adopting DVB-H standards and this was a logical extension of our DVB-T services. DVB-H over IP based on open standards will provide a discerning mobile broadcast experience to Indian consumer and we are confident of its success in our country which has historically been on the leading edge of broadcast technology and content creation.”

As the national television broadcaster of India, Doordarshan runs the largest Free to Air Satellite (DTH) services covering the entire country. Its analog territory broadcast network covers more than 92% of India providing free news, sports and entertainment.

Mobile TV broadcasting allows the user to watch their favourite TV programmes on their mobile device. The service works by receiving a digital TV broadcast signal optimized for mobile devices from the air in much the same way as televisions at home do. Broadcast mobile TV is not the same as a streaming video service over 3G or GPRS where each recipient gets a separate copy of the program stream. Rather, one simultaneous TV stream can be received at any time by any number of users enjoying high picture quality and low battery power consumption.