In January this year, China Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was covering 280 Chinesse cities with its mobile TV service based on CMMB (China Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting)
Late last year, CBC had approximately 3.5 million subscribers, by the end of this year it is expected to have 10 million customers. Over the next five years the number of subscribers to the CBC should reach 100 million.
Basing on the CMMB infrastructure, it is planned to launch additional services, including e-payments and navigation. CBC already offers navigation service in 10 major Chinese cities.
Mobile access to TV broadcasts monthly costs about $2, but due to promotional campaign the customers who purchase selected terminals have a free subscription for three years.
CMMB is the equivalent to the DVB-SH, which is a hybrid standard of digital television transmission from the satellite to mobile receivers, with the use of terrestrial transmitters to cover the urban areas.
The system based on IP protocol allows "multicast" and "unicast" transmissions. This allows more than a 100-fold reduction in transmission costs, compared to the usual media streaming based on cellular base stations. A huge advantage of this method is immediate coverage of the whole territory (outdoors).
CMMB uses S band (2635 - 2660 MHz) for satellite transmission and UHF band (470 - 862 MHz) for terrestrial transmission. In the former case, the 25 MHz wide band comprises 25 TV channels, 30 radio channels, and additional channels of data. The bandwidth of the UHF channels is 2 or 8 MHz, depending on the size of the data stream. The transmissions provide video with QCIF (176 × 144) or QVGA (320 x 240) resolution. Return channel is implemented in a traditional way, using cellular telephony system.
Mobile TV in China is also available in broadcasting version, based on the DMB-T/H standard (Digital Multimedia Broadcast-Terrestrial/
