Dyle Mobile DTV Sets Partnership to Reach Backseats of Cars
Live TV broadcasts will come to the backseats of cars through a partnership between Voxx International’s Audiovox and the Mobile Content Venture’s (MCV) Dyle Mobile DTV, executives said. “The car is one of the last places where live TV doesn’t currently reach,” said Salil Dalvi, senior vice president-mobile platform development at NBCUniversal Digital Distribution and co-general manager of MCV. “It is a great opportunity for us to extend the reach of our broadcasters to another audience.” MCV includes Fox, Ion, NBCU and a group of TV station affiliates called Pearl LLC that includes Belo, Cox, Scripps, Gannett, Hearst, Media General, Meredith, Post-Newsweek and Raycom.
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Audiovox will work with its distribution channel partners to get the mobile DTV receivers into vehicles that already have or are getting new rear-seat entertainment systems, said Tom Malone, Audiovox Electronics president. He estimated there are about 25 million to 30 million screens already in autos, most of which have been connected to DVD players. “For us, it’s a great selling message,” Malone said. The aftermarket retail channel for in-car electronics has been looking for new categories to sell, he said. “We think a majority of them will carry this product as part of their retail product mix.” Audiovox will also work with manufacturers, dealers and other retailers to get the devices installed in more cars, he said.
The device, a black box that connects to the car’s entertainment system through video cables, will include a GPS receiver as well, Malone said. That will let the service know which channels to tune to because mobile DTV availability varies by market, he said. The average screen size of a rear-seat embedded monitor is about 7 inches, but will soon be 8 inches, Malone said. Screens that drop down from the car’s ceiling are generally a bit larger at 10 inches, he said.
Dalvi said he’s confident that stations’ mobile DTV signals, which are typically delivered at a bitrate of 400 kbps, will be robust enough to deliver a good quality image on screens of that size. “For anything past 10 inches, it’s going to be fairly pixelated, but our view is that up to 10 inches, it’s good quality for anything, including sports,” he said. Moreover the stations can increase the amount of bits they devote to mobile DTV service over time, and new technology is improving the quality of picture that can be compressed into smaller bitrates, he said.
Reception of the DTV signal, which can be spotty for handheld devices (CD Aug 10 p10), should improve in the car, Dalvi said. That’s because the entire car can act as an antenna for the signal. “The antenna size is not constrained to a small pull-out antenna in a phone or accessory,” he said. You've got much better quality reception in an automobile."
There will be different user experiences between Dyle service in cars and on handheld devices, Dalvi said. “We still have a lot of work ahead of us to figure out all the details of how all this stuff will work,” he said. “I'm confident that Audiovox is the right partner to help wrestle with those issues.” So far, MCV has received “good feedback” from MetroPCS sales reps who have been selling a new Samsung phone with an embedded mobile DTV receiver.