DVB-H

DVB-H stands for Digital Video Broadcasting â€--œ Handheld and it’s the European home-grown standard for broadcasting mobile television to handheld receivers, like mobile phones. The spec does not require a carrier’s network since it is a broadcasting technology it travels through the airâ€--so it is not limited to phones alone. On the other hand, it requires a separate receiver within the handset. ETSI adopted the standard for DVB-H in November 2004 but launches are only just beginning in 2006 in places like Italy, the U.S. and Finland. The Mobile Digital Television Alliance or mDTV Alliance was formed in 2005 and is pushing for the adoption of DVB-H. The group is comprised of vendors across the mobile TV value chain. As far as R&D dollars and headlines go, DVB-H’s main competitor is Qualcomm’s MediaFLO technology, which, like DVB-H, does not run over a carrier’s network but in FLO’s case, it requires its own.
HSDPA

HSDPA stands for high-speed downlink packet access, which is a mobile protocol sometimes known as 3.5G. Some would say it “extends” WCDMA in the same way that EV-DO extends CDMA2000. The improved data rates that HSDPA will bring are quoted at increasing WCDMA data rates by a factor of five, or somewhere in the range of 400 Kbit/s to 700 Kbits/s. At least, that’s the range Cingular claimed for its HSDPA service that it deployed in December 2005. The “D” in HSDPA is the crux of the technology as it is “downlink” only or communication from the server to the handset, and not the other way around. Therefore, HSDPA provides faster download times and the like for mobile content.