The days of mobile television in broadcast standard DVB-H are numbered in Austria with the participating companies—Telekom Austria, Orange, Hutchison 3G Austria and Media Broadcast—deciding to pull the plug on the ailing service on 31 December 2010.
According to industry insiders, only 10,000 to 15,000 customers have been acquired. Austria is not alone: Mobile TV in DVB-H already failed in neighbouring states Germany and Switzerland.
The broadcast technology which has been tailor-made for mobile television, suffers from the necessity to set up and operate a separate transmission network - which is a costly undertaking.
On the other hand, broadband mobile network standard UMTS is already available in large parts of the countries and can be received using most modern mobile phones while DVB-H-based models have been scarce.
Furthermore, a growing number of mobile phones is capable of receiving free-to-air television channels from conventional DTT networks (DVB-T) which, in contrary to DVB-H, are available at no charge to viewers.
