ATSC license fees released

The licensing fee for ATSC receivers will be US$5 per unit. Up to now it has been impossible to know what license fees would be payable by manufacturers to the holders of essential technology patents in the ATSC system. This has been in contrast to situation for DVB-T where a patent pool has been in existence for some years now, with the maximum cost per receiver set at around $1 ( i.e. a maximum of 0.75 EUR).

This could all be very significant for Latin America, where the costs of receivers, and specifically set-top boxes, will be a crucial factor. When we talk about a STB costing in or around $30-$50, the difference between $5 per box and $1 per box in licensing fees becomes quite significant.

http://www.mpegla.com/atsc/atsc-agreement.cfm

Norway is up and running

This is the Grundig DTR8720, one of three boxes consumers in Norway can now choose from following the launch of DVB-T services on September 1st. The Norwegians have taken advantage of the fact that they're coming a little later to the party by diving straight in with MPEG-4 video coding and AAC+ for audio.

Interestingly, given all the doom and gloom over the last year, they've also decided to go with MHP as the interactive middleware for the platform. Currently only one of the two Grundig receivers that are available is MHP-enabled. The Sagem receiver is not. A visitor to the IBC show in Amsterdam last week told me that they're expecting more MHP receivers to become available on the market there in the next few months.

The cheaper of the two Grundig models (i.e. the one without MHP) is retailing for around € 150 - the MHP box is about €50 more at the moment.

It'll be interesting to see how prices go in the coming months.

There are a number of blog posts in English about the launch here. And the official site for the service provider (in Norwegian) is here.