Germany’s leading broadcasters and media groups will use the MHP standard for iTV set top boxes.
German broadcasters ARD and ZDF, along with media groups RTL and KirchGruppe, have have signed the ‘Mainz Declaration’ to roll out the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) application programming interface in their set-top boxes. The German conference of regulatory authorities for broadcasting has also signed the agreement.
The first sizeable commercial deployments of compliant boxes will be in mid-2002. However, Kirch’s Premier World pay-TV platform needs to migrate its installed base of proprietary ‘d-boxes’ to the MHP standard. While both systems are Java-based, and Kirch says it the d-boxes will receive flash downloads of MHP, it is not yet clear how complete a download this will be.
The move will change the competitive environment in Germany. Premier World, the only sizeable German pay-TV platform, has dominated the early development of digital TV. However, growth has been slow compared to other European markets, at least partly because there are already 30 free-to-air channels delivered over cable, which passes approximately 85% of homes. Without pay-TV revenues to subsidize set-top boxes, retail will become an increasingly important channel.
Phillips is manufacturing a low-end MHP set-top box for Germany, but buyers will not receive Kirch’s pay-TV services unless the operator makes its BetaCrypt conditional access system available as a common interface, which it has so far refused. This highlights that, as well as MHP, the German interactive TV market needs a common interface for conditional access.
However, major cable operator Liberty Media has said that it will not adopt MHP for its most basic set-top boxes, which it plans to give away for free. This would leave many of its 10 million German subscribers unable to use iTV content.
iTV has been a long time coming in Germany, but it is finally set for take-off. By committing to the MHP standard, content developers will be set free to develop interactive TV that will be accessible by the majority of digital TV homes, allowing vital economies of scale to undertake currently prohibitively expensive developments.
