DVB-H licensing terms to be revealed soon

摘要

Licensing terms for the DVB-H mobile-television standard are set to be published at the end of March, according to the company in charge of a "pool" of DVB-H patent holders. Italian patent management company Sisvel said that it was confident it would be able to disclose the full licensing terms and royalty fees for the technology by the end of the month, following lengthy talks with owners of intellectual property rights (IPR) in the standard. The move would end uncertainty among mobile-phone operators and handset manufacturers as to the total costs associated with deploying DVB-H. Roberto Dini, founder of Sisvel, declined to disclose precisely how much the pool planned to charge licensees, but said that he did not expect licensing costs to be higher than US$3 (￡1.51) per device and could be "much lower". Royalty levels had been calculated on the basis of projected market volumes for DVB-H, Dini said, adding that Sisvel and the patent holders had been working on the assumption that there would be about 100 million devices deployed annually in western Europe by 2011/2012. Companies that are already offering DVB-H services would be obliged to pay royalties backdated to when their service was first launched. But Dini stressed that current users of the technology should not see this as cause for concern.