The Broadcast Mobile Convergence Forum, known as bmcoforum, says that mobile TV has made big strides and is becoming a mass-market medium that marketers should target.

The mission of the organization is to enable interoperability between back-end systems and terminals from different vendors by prioritizing a sub-set of the service layer functionality defined in upcoming standards. For this purpose and based on commercial requirements from the bmcoforum members, profiles of the OMA BCAST enabler specifications have been developed.

"Other vendors, which are not members of the bmcoforum, are now able to access the bmcoforum recommendations for implementation profiles," said Dr. Claus Sattler, executive director of the bmcoforum, Munich, Germany. "It shall also draw the attention of potential service providers to what is and what will be available for commercial services.

"Regarding the services, which have started in 2008, the profiles focused the vendors' implementation efforts on the service features, which are required by service providers," he said.

"This avoids fragmentation caused by specific implementations for individual service providers and ensures interoperability among the platforms and devices of different vendors."

Specifications include those functions of OMA BCAST that have been agreed upon between operators, system and handset vendors to be a top priority in early deployments of Mobile TV Broadcast based on DVB-H and 3G cellular networks.

The main objective of this activity is to facilitate and accelerate the development of OMA BCAST implementations by focussing initial implementations intended for the launch of mobile TV services.

This way, time to market can be shortened while maximizing interoperability from the start.

Implementers of the profiles may, of course, implement more functions of OMA BCAST on top of the basic set described in the bmcoforum implementation profiles.

All European commercial Mobile TV Broadcast services which were launched in 2008 are based on the bmcoforum implementation profiles of the OMA BCAST enabler.

After having been initially exclusively available for bmcoforum members, the documents are available now for public download at http://www.bmcoforum.org.

The Broadcast Mobile Convergence Forum, or bmcoforum, the worldwide industry association of mobile broadcasting, was founded to shape an open global market environment for mobile broadcast services.

The bmcoforum's members include Nokia Siemens Networks, Thomson, Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, Nokia, LG, Samsung, Sagem, RRD, castlabs, Nagra, NDS, Irdeto, Viaccess, Enensys and Sony Ericsson.

The 100-plus members of bmcoforum have joined forces to identify relevant content and services, support technology standardization and implementation, as well as lobbying for spectrum and suitable regulatory framework.

The goal is to accelerate commercial implementations of new user experiences in receiving broadcasting services and initiating interactivity of mobile devices. These implementation profiles are designed to shorten time to market for mobile TV services.

The bmcoforum has a rosy outlook for mobile TV industry in the United States in 2009 and beyond.

Meanwhile, the Open Mobile Video Coalition, or OMVC, is touting its Mobile DTV standard.

The coalition includes 800-plus U.S. broadcasters who want to launch free-to-air mobile TV by simulcasting their regular digital broadcast signals to mobile devices.

According to various reports, the new service will be branded "Mobile DTV: Never Miss A Minute."

Electronics manufacturers including LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics and Harris Corp. have supported the initiative.

The new standard allows broadcasters to use existing bandwidth and multiplexes to broadcast a mobile TV signal.

"MediaFlo USA expects to nearly double the number of cities it serves in 2009," bmcoforum's Dr. Sattler said. "It aims to operate in 108 markets by the end of 2009."